Dear List: A long time mystery has at last been revealed to us.
I had not worked out how Arachne drove PPPDD.exe to establish the packet driver when you log in. I figured the exe should run by itself. I downloaded DOSPPPD.ZIP and looked at the files and read the documents and fiddled with all sorts of qualifiers after the EXE name and allways got either "command not recognised" or "packet driver not installed" The trick turned out to be to use "local" rather than "Passive" in the command of the sort: "pppdd com2 19200 local 150.6.86.235:150.6.86.231" You can load serveral packet drivers also! 0x60, 0x61, 0x62, .... James worked it out after reading some OS/2 documentation on packet drivers. The notes that come with the ZIP are misleading in this way as they have obviously come from a UNIX land document. The result is that we were able to get two DOS machines logged into each other using PPP over a serial cable, and using the ftp from CUTCP to transfer files. This make for a very thin client in a network we are hopeing to implement with junk modems and lots of fencing wire ... The disappointment of the week was OPENDOS multitasking. It worked fine with internal processes, but any attempt at a process using a comm port or a network card gave some pretty nasty crashes. I fiddled with slices and com port ownership for ages in the taskmgr.ini file and got little improvement. As stated in the documentation BOA DOS server will run with multitasking on which is better than nothing, but still disappointing. Bye Kali
