Re: [Freedos-user] VirtualBox and FTP
I am a little late in responding; moving an entire house of belongings and children is not fun. Mateusz provided a good explanation - it is active vs. passive mode connections. Back 15 years ago before NAT was in widespread use all FTP connections were active. The client would initiate a connection to the server for sending commands. If data needed to be sent the server would initiate the connection to the client. And in the very very old days, specific port numbers were assumed. NAT completely screws this up by acting as a diode, allowing new connections to pass through in one direction but not in the other. So your FTP client can make the control connection to the server, but the server can not make a connection back to the client because of NAT. Directory listings require a new socket, so this breaks even simple commands. There are two ways around this. Most firewalls that implement NAT do some basic packet inspection and detect this particular FTP problem, and correct for it. So even though NAT dictates that the FTP server should not be able to make an inbound TCP connection to your client behind the firewall, the firewall actively does some work to allow this. It has to inspect packets to do this, and it only works with the well-known FTP port (21). If you choose a non-standard FTP control port to work with, it breaks. The second is to use passive connections. When in passive mode, the client always initiates new socket connections, even for data transfers. If your client can make the control connection then it can also make the data connection. The FTP protocol is really very powerful. It allows you to direct data transfers between multiple machines, if you can coordinate them. It was too complex for it's own good though. Just use passive mode connections and you'll be fine. I'm not sure what is wrong with the VirtualBox host only mode. It is not working for me here either. Mike -- Slashdot TV. Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. http://tv.slashdot.org/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FDNPKG ?
On 8/14/2014 3:52 AM, Mateusz Viste wrote: Hi Ulrich, Thanks for your feedback! On 08/14/2014 12:05 AM, Ulrich wrote: FDNPKG installs the MTCP programs into C:\FDOS\MTCP instead of C:\FDOS\BIN. This is not really about FDNPKG, but more about how packages are structured. Indeed, I tend to avoid putting to much stuff into %FREEDOS%\BIN, and only put there stuff that is supposed to be part of the FreeDOS core (ie BASE, that is similar functionality than what MSDOS was providing). Now the question is where to put any 3rd party apps that are still supposed to be callable from anywhere in the directories tree? One option could be to create another BIN-like directory for these (which would be close to what Linux does - sbin vs bin - but I'm not sure this will look natural to DOS folks), or (and this is my favorite so far), install any 3rd party progs as usual program (dedicated directory), but add a link to special directory (say, %FREEDOS%\links for instance). The link would be a simple BAT file that would call the real program. This is actually a method I'm using on my own PC. Any other thoughts? I had explicitly asked for mTCP to be packaged in a separate directory. mTCP includes documentation and configuration files, and having those lumped in with many many other files would it more difficult to find them if you did not know the exact name of what you were looking for. It also prevents naming conflicts. mTCP should be callable from anywhere, not just its own directory. I think this is an appropriate use of the PATH environment variable. Small, well known utilities are safe to put together in a BIN-like directory. Utilities that require multiple files are probably better isolated into their own directory. Mike -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] mTCP's FTP and power management
Before we claim that mTCP is not compatible with FDAPM, what FDAPM options are you using? fdapm apmdos has worked for me before. My notes are in power.txt. Mike -- Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How do you transfer files to your FreeDOS machine
On 8/4/2014 3:18 AM, Mateusz Viste wrote: * Running a mTCP FTP server on the DOS machine (Matej, Michael, Ulrich) - this is nice, although I'd prefer keeping the DOS PC as a simple 'client'. I am confused by this. Both the FTP client and FTP server are DOS EXE programs. Why would running the FTP server change the nature of your PC? If you want a minimal solution, a command line FTP client is perfect. If you don't like command line FTP clients, well, better clients for DOS really do not exist. You can run the FTP server on DOS instead and run whatever client you want on your more advanced machines. That's not a terribly compromise to make to take advantage of a solution that works *today*. -- Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How do you transfer files to your FreeDOS machine
On 8/4/2014 7:10 AM, Mateusz Viste wrote: BTW, I also tried the FTP client that comes with mTCP, but it proved to be hardly useable on my PC. Dunno what's wrong, the symptom is that it reacts very poorly to keyboard input, at every keypress, I have to wait like 1s or 2 for the character to appear on the screen. Typing the anonymous login itself is quite frustrating already, not talking about any further get/put/ls magic. Any idea why it's behaving this way? (this might be a subject better suited offlist, if you'd like me to perform any debugging steps, which I'll be glad to follow, if you think there's a point to look for some bug there). How about sending a bug report? I make it so easy for people to tell me when something is not quite right, but I never get bug reports ... It works perfectly on 8088 class machines, which is as slow as you can get. So to figure out what is wrong in your environment I would like to know the brand/type of machine, the date on the BIOS, which version of DOS (FreeDOS I assume), and any TSRs that you have loaded - especially ones related to power management. One of the DOS power management TSRs had a bad side effect that resembled what you described. mTCP generally uses BIOS routines for handling the keyboard. This is generally very reliable and fast. Mike -- Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How do you transfer files to your FreeDOS machine
mTCP provides three options: - an FTP client for DOS. Not point and click user friendly, but it does what it is supposed to do. - HTGET for downloading a file from an HTTP server - an FTP server for DOS. This allows you to use a graphical FTP client on another machine. For when I want real drive letter access I use MS LANMAN. Mike -- Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] FreeDOS featured on Ars Technica
A little more notoriety ... http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/dos-boot-ars-spends-a-day-working-in-freedos/ I don't regularly check Ars Technica. I was alerted by the sound of my PCjr happily beeping away at an increased rate; the PCjr is running the mTCP web server as an experiment, and some of the people reading the FreeDOS article are digging deeper and checking out mTCP too. Mike -- Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] EMODE - translation from Pascal to C - solved
I have noticed quite a few code bloat issues with the Watcom C runtime. For some of the more obscure functions it is often better to write some inline assembly and make the DOS or BIOS call directly than it is to use the corresponding C runtime function. The stat() family of functions are a good example of this; you can get what you need more efficiently by using the native DOS interrupts. Watcom has double byte character support too, which has a pretty large overhead for programs that do not need it. Mike -- Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] display command
Synchronizing the sending of bits over parallel interfaces is much more difficult than it is to send a single serial bit stream. As a result, you can send that single serial stream of bits faster than you can do it in parallel across multiple wires. SCSI went through this transition when drives moved from parallel SCSI to FibreChannel and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). SATA has followed a similar evolution. Even the PCI bus has moved to a serial implementation. You can enjoy your older hardware; I certainly do. But the rest of the world has moved on to these serial variants for a reason. (Keep in mind that none of this takes into account that the hard drive performance is generally limited by the device itself, not the interface.) Mike -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available. Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP web server test
Some of you out there are mTCP users, so this should interest you ... I have a PCjr running an early version of the mTCP web server. It is serving (most) of its own web site: http://67.185.176.54:8080/ That link has the main page, and it should look like my normal PCjr web site. This next link has some fun server status like memory available, DOS version, BIOS date, etc.: http://67.185.176.54:8080/proc/ There are one or two links that are broken because I did not get all of the content moved over. Otherwise, it should work if you try it. The speed might not be great as it is a 4.77Mhz machine and multiple people can make requests at the same time, so be patient - it will catch up. No saturation bombing please, as it is easy to DoS a DOS machine. I'm collecting log and debug data from this test to help me find problems and make it better. Your few moments of clicking will help me gather more data. Regards, Mike -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Makehtml v0.0.1
I am not one to find fault with other people's work for the joy of finding fault, but I am having a hard time seeing how this code is useful or relevant: - The headers that it is putting at the top of the file are fixed in format. You still have to edit the output to change the string author to your name, content to something other than anonymous, keywords to something other than blank, etc. - It assumes your output is going to be in a table that is width 500. There is no option to not generate the table tag or set any of the attributes. - It always assumes that you need a link to an image embedded in the output. The image is always 180 pixels wide and 90 pixels high. There is no error checking to see if that filename was even provided so it generates garbage if that option is missing. - It puts a very spammy link to Digitalatoll Webpage Solutions at the bottom of the generated file. I'm sorry, but sometimes a free offering isn't worth accepting. This code can probably be replaced with the DOS copy command and a few text files; the copy command also lets you append things to files. The spammy link and the inability to customize the output without changing the code and recompiling make it very very limited. DOS users don't need this, and I doubt that Linux users need it either. Mike -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Makehtml v0.0.1
On 5/25/2013 1:45 PM, Rugxulo wrote: GPL, so patches welcome! :-) Patch what? This code is so tragically flawed and devoid of purpose that there is nothing worth patching. The patch to make it useful and get rid of the obvious problems that I pointed out would be bigger than the original program, by quite a wide margin too. - The headers that it is putting at the top of the file are fixed in format. You still have to edit the output to change the string author to your name, content to something other than anonymous, keywords to something other than blank, etc. A lot of tools (even digital cameras) do this, mostly because of default copyrighting, etc. (Yes, I realize putting digital camera user or whatever as author isn't very useful for enforcing copyright, but still ) Repeat after me: There is no point in writing a program that spits out fixed strings that are anonymous/generic in nature. The whole point of writing a program is to make it flexible for a wide range of inputs and outputs. - It always assumes that you need a link to an image embedded in the output. The image is always 180 pixels wide and 90 pixels high. There is no error checking to see if that filename was even provided so it generates garbage if that option is missing. Yeah, error checking, the bane of a programmer's existence. :-P http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html Error checking? Forget the error checking - just what is the usefulness of spitting out a link to an optional image at one point in the file and fixing the width and height? Anybody who knows rudimentary HTML knows that if you don't know the image size, let the browser figure it out? It's just useless! - It puts a very spammy link to Digitalatoll Webpage Solutions at the bottom of the generated file. That is par for the course, many other tools do the same (e.g. GNU Enscript). Manual editing of the output is thus required. This is a link to a commercial business, not an open source site. It has no business in the output, period. Manual editing is required is being polite - that kind of garbage does not belong in the program in the first place. I'm sorry, but sometimes a free offering isn't worth accepting. This code can probably be replaced with the DOS copy command and a few text files; the copy command also lets you append things to files. I wrote my own .pas to .htm converter in .sed recently. Quite buggy. :-)It's a bit trickier than just pasting bits together. Well, my big problem was uppercasing reserved keywords within string literals (big no no), but I figured it was easy enough to manually fix, if needed. Outside of writing my own complete Pascal grammar parser, it's not too easy to avoid. (I also ended up weakly patching apashtm to work without Lazarus.) The spammy link and the inability to customize the output without changing the code and recompiling make it very very limited. I think changing the code and manually editing for one's needs is implied here. You don't need code to do this. You could just as easily insert a few lines at the top of your text file with a text editor, or use the copy command. This program does nothing that can't be done with the copy command and concatenating snippets of files. DOS users don't need this, and I doubt that Linux users need it either. In fairness, nobody needs computers at all, society lived without them for thousands of years. And this IS only v0.0.1, keep in mind. ;-) P.S. I don't know the history of the Internet nor all programs ever made. I'm not sure if GNU A2PS is an official or unofficial precursor to GNU Enscript. There does seem to be some partial common heritage there. In any case, A2PS has a script called card which will print a reference card of a program based upon its inline help. Just for reference, that exists as well. Oh, and I guess help2man (written in Perl) is vaguely similar. Yeah, lots and lots of doc formats out there. What does this have to do with anything? -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Makehtml v0.0.1
Rugxulo, Sometimes I have to wonder about your competence ... I'm done ranting for now. Enjoy looking forward to 0.0.2. -Mike -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] mTCP 2013-04-26 (DOS TCP/IP) is available
Just a warning - a user reported to me that Netcat was not working correctly in this version. It turned out to be a build script problem. Nothing else was affected. I have placed a new version of the executables on the web site with a new version number. Please update if you use Netcat or ever thing you might want to use it. My apologies go out to anybody who was caught by this. I try to test everything using the same Zip files that I make available for download to others, but I missed this one. Mike -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Official IRC channel?
The old official IRC channel at irc.i7c.org does not work anymore, probably because i7c.org is no longer running an IRC server. Worse, i7c looks like an unconfigured virtual server. Can we designate a new IRC channel on a network that is better supported? And then update http://www.freedos.org/lists/ ? (I'll handle the Wikipedia entry, which is old and needs other updates too.) Freenode.net is a pretty popular and robust IRC network. The unofficial channel is already there at ##freedos ... Mike -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. This 200-page book is written by three acclaimed leaders in the field. The early access version is available now. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/neotech_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP 2013-04-26 (DOS TCP/IP) is available
And nearly another year has passed by ... This version includes: * All: improved TCP/IP lost packet and retransmit support * All: DHCP lease expiration detection and warning * IRCjr: mIRC color codes, improved logging support, 132 column awareness, bug fixes * FTP client: user input can be longer now (2 lines), 125 responses handled better * FTP server: improved compatibility with more clients. * Telnet: improved emulation (scroll regions and origin mode support) * Many other small fixes and improvements ... Everything is available at http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ . Enjoy! Mike -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] EMail from forgotten printfil.com, an LPTx interception utility
Hilarious ... That picture with the cute little old printer on it was lifted from one of my web pages: http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/pc_compact_printer.html The ragged paper line matches perfectly. Mike On 2/1/2013 12:32 AM, john s wolter wrote: I received an EMail from printfil.com http://printfil.com, an LPTx interception utility. It might be used with a PC emulator on a Windows. It has a number of interesting features. Cheers, John S Wolter -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_jan ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] EMail from forgotten printfil.com, an LPTx interception utility
On 2/1/2013 1:10 PM, john s wolter wrote: Michael, Did you produce that image originally? If so and it is copyrighted you could ask for it to be removed. Cheers, John S Wolter It is my image - I own the printer and took the picture. However, it is not worth pursuing. I wish people would just give credit or ask first, but life isn't perfect and I know that I have infringed on a few copyrights in my time too. It is also not the first time that it has happened; but it's a funny when you randomly find something like that. As for the printer, it is a serial printer running at 1200 bps designed for the PCjr. It uses thermal paper (like an old fax machine) so the images degrade over time. It was not a terribly popular printer. Mike -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_jan ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] New standard FreeDOS text editor - what it should be (voting)?
Most people have a favorite editor already; you have an uphill battle if you think that one editor can replace the rest. Here are some comments on your feature list: - 8088 class machines should be supported. There is nothing in the 80286 or 80386 opcode set that should be required for a good editor, unless you are going to use large amounts of memory and need DOS extender support. Once again, 8088 class machines are not just in use by museum staff. There are a large number of hobby systems out there. - If you think a good editor can not be written in C, then I think you should get more experience working in C. Entire operating systems and complex applications are written in C, and have been for decades now. Nobody really cares what language you use, as long as it works. - An editor should be small enough to run on a 128K machine. The executable size should be small too for use from a floppy disk. This is important when doing maintenance and a hard drive is temporarily unavailable. - Calculator? How many people do not have a physical calculator or cell phone laying around nearby? - Font support - whatever you can get from the DOS codepage support would be acceptable. - Editors do not need interpreted languages in them. (EMACs users, please forgive me.) - An editor should be smart enough to page in parts of the file as it needs to from disk. This enables editing of files that are larger than the memory size. - An editor should have journalling to help recover the lost work if the machine crashes while editing. This is normally done by recording the keystrokes to a separate temporary file and flushing them to disk periodically. In the event of a crash the journal file can be replayed to restore most of the edits, and hopefully not cause another crash because of a bug in the editor. - Undo support. - The ability to convert tabs to whitespace and vice-versa. - A pop-up on-screen ruler. - Regular expression support for searching through text. - A hexadecimal display mode. And I'm sure that other people have many other good ideas ... Mike -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] New standard FreeDOS text editor - what it should be (voting)?
On 1/29/2013 11:09 AM, Tom Ehlert wrote: - An editor should be small enough to run on a 128K machine. FreeDOS will not run on a 128K machine. Ok. Then make it 256. You get the idea. I haven't looked into the source code, but is FreeDOS really that much of a memory hog where it will not boot and run in 128K? That seems absurd. We can debate how useful a 128K machine is, but DOS can't possibly be using all of that memory. - Calculator? How many people do not have a physical calculator or cell phone laying around nearby? you are right. but wtf will I use a 128K machine for if I have a iPhone around ? Because some people are interested in old hardware ? What kind of question is that? Why is anybody messing with FreeDOS in the first place? Let's not get into that discussion again ... - An editor should have journalling to help recover the lost work if the machine crashes while editing. This is normally done by recording the keystrokes to a separate temporary file and flushing them to disk periodically. In the event of a crash the journal file can be replayed to restore most of the edits, and hopefully not cause another crash because of a bug in the editor. yep. and run on a 128K machine ? DAED and (the advanced version of Dewar's Visual EDitor) has this feature. It ran well in a 128K machine. Journalling to a file is less of a memory hog than undo is. Here is a link: http://brutman.com/PCjr/downloads/daed.zip - A hexadecimal display mode. yep. and run on a 128K machine ? Hex display of the current screen is that much overhead? You know that most of my mTCP applications run in 192K or less, and that includes and entire TCP/IP stack ... I understand your skepticism. But running in a 128K machine is really not such a stretch. (Unless FreeDOS really is a memory hog. I'll have to go see what it's using.) Mike -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] New standard FreeDOS text editor - what it should be (voting)?
Tom, Get up on the wrong side of the bed today? Why so defensive? PC/MS DOS 5.x and 6.x will run in 256K with usable memory to spare. PC/MS DOS 3.x will run in 128K with usable memory to spare. If FreeDOS is designed/optimized for a bigger footprint then that's fair, but there is nothing wrong with asking or trying to push the limits. So make it 256K. Fine. The point (which you missed by a country mile) is that it should run on a fairly small machine. Because they are out there ... And no, 35 years ago would put us in 1978. 128K/256K PC style machines were common even in 1985/1986. FreeDOS does not add that much extra function where a 256K (or even a smaller machine) could not be a reasonable target. I don't question your use case .. please stop acting like mine is idiocy/blasphemy. Get a hold of yourself, this is a what-if discussion ... I'd also reserve the use of wtf for situations that deserve it. Like, when a tree falls on your car. I can't understand why mailing lists have to devolve into this kind of crap. Mike -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Log in at C prompt
On 1/7/2013 5:34 AM, Russell Benson wrote: Hi I have loaded freedos and I get to Welcome To FreeDos Operating system C:\ What do I need to do to get into the system? That is probably the best/only laugh I have ever had on this mailing list ... It reminds me of the introduction to an old game (Hacker, by Activision) ... I've had it wrong all of these years, the C: prompt is actually a very subtle login prompt. Remember, friends don't let friends install foreign OSes while impaired ... Mike -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122412 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printer Drivers needed for old DOS programs
The time to consider DOS compatibility is *before* you purchase the printer. If your printer can do some form of PCL then you are probably safe. A higher end HP laser printer should definitely understand PCL. Old Epson printer emulation and PostScript would be acceptable too - a Brother laser printer that I bought 1.5 years ago does all three. If your printer can not do any of those then it is probably hopeless for DOS. (Nobody is writing new DOS printer drivers.) -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_123012 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Stack overflow
First, the good news - Watcom includes code at the start and end of each function to detect stack overflows. It is a lot easier to debug code when you know what the root cause of the problem is. If the stack overflow were to happen and remain silent, you could have all sorts of strange behavior. - Don't allocate large structures on the stack. That is the first problem. 8KB for a stack object is pretty large. Use malloc or other dynamic memory allocation instead. - If you need a large stack because you have lots of functions calling each other or are writing recursive code, there is a linker option to increase the size of the stack. The default size is small. I usually use stack=4096 on my mTCP apps to increase the size to something more reasonable for my code. You can figure out the correct value for your code by trial and error or by doing a careful analysis of your code. Mike -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Stack overflow
On 12/20/2012 2:41 PM, Tom Ehlert wrote: asking programming errors on a mailing list that is focused on operating system development is considered BAD. I don't think we have enough developers (OS or application) or enough list traffic where we can afford to be picky ... Mike -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Stack overflow
On 12/20/2012 3:11 PM, Ralf A. Quint wrote: At 12:58 PM 12/20/2012, Louis Santillan wrote: The Memory Model (Tiny vs. Small vs. Compact vs. Medium vs. Large, .COM vs. .EXE) of the compiler could be causing the issue. Some compilers used to default to Small. What compiler flags are you using? Even in the TINY model, there is no reason to get a stack overflow, if the compiler indeed is not artificially limiting the stack size. The sample program is using 8KB static data, 8KB+some slack for stack and likely 2KB of code, as there is no output like printf. All well below of the limit of 64KB. SMALL and MEDIUM memory models only have static data and stack in the same segment and separate 64KB for code, while COMPACT, LARGE and HUGE (Borland only) even have their own 64KB stack segment... This should compile and run, regardless of the memory model... Ralf Ah, but the compiler probably is creating some boundaries based on having to fit static variables, code, near heap and stack all in the same segment. This is a simple problem to fix. The Watcom linker guide has a discussion of the STACK= option. You can create a map file and look at it to see what the default is for your particular memory model. (They wisely did not publish the defaults, as they might change from release to release.) Mike -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] hunting a program?
mTCP sounds right. ; - 0 The latest versions are at Google Code: https://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ . It gets updated more frequently than FreeDOS does, hence the spamming the mailing list. The next version so far has mostly IRCjr fixes and improvements. I'm also looking into making it more compatible with the JAWS screen reader. The FTP client will get a few small fixes, and the FTP server might get a little faster. If you have requests or bug reports, now would be a great time to let me know. I have the skeleton of a Gopher client, an idea for a setup program to make that easier, a diagnostics program to try to help figure out networking problems, and some misc other features I'm thinking about, but I'm not motivated enough to turn them into usable programs yet. Mike On 12/18/2012 10:10 PM, cordat...@aol.com wrote: Karen, If by getting old hardware on the internet you mean successfully connecting old hardware to the internet then you may be referring to Mike Brutman and his networking package mTCP. If on the other handby getting old hardware on the internet you mean someone who buys stuff from ebay or craigslist I'm unsure... Dave -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] What about scsi???
Does the SCSI card have an onboard BIOS? If so, it should provide BIOS level access to hard drives using INT 13h. You should not need device drivers to access that function. Windows wants device drivers for additional device support and performance. FreeDOS is just fine with BIOS level support. -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] hard drive question?
I think I was pretty clear - I think that 8GB is more than enough for any DOS system I'm ever going to run ... As much as I enjoyed DOS, when it was current the amount of user data one would typically have was infinitely smaller. If you are going to store gigabytes of music and photos and use them on a day to day basis, FAT16 is probably not a great filesystem and DOS is not a great OS. So while it is possible, it is not probably. I hope you are not archiving source code, specs, docs, jpgs, books, web pages, other OSes, etc. using DOS. It is interesting to push the limits, but often not productive. That is not a typical use-case for DOS. Mike On 11/13/2012 9:50 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Nov 13, 2012 8:39 PM, Michael B. Brutman mbbrut...@brutman.com mailto:mbbrut...@brutman.com wrote: I think that 8GB is more than enough for any DOS system I'm ever going to run ... Sarcasm or serious? :-) We all know the (false) 640k quote attributed to Bill Gates. But nothing ever stays the same. While I agree that 8 GB is a ton for DOS (or even XP, right?), it's not that hard to imagine user data going beyond that. Say you install a lot of games. Or a lot of music files. Or tons of compilers. Or just lots and lots of source code. Or just tons of specs, docs, etc. Even lots of .JPGs. Or maybe books, web pages, email archives, other OSes, etc. My desktop has a 4 GB FAT32 partition for FreeDOS, but now I've only got 400 MB free left, heh. And it's not all wasted slack space either (thankfully!). Sure, I could clean up or backup (USB HD or CD-R) or even delete a large part of that. But the point is that it's sometimes hard to decide in advance how much will be needed. (Sometimes having multiple versions is good for regression testing.) BTW, I'm far from the biggest hoarder or most obsessed and experienced DOS power user (I think??), but I could easily fill a DVD with lots of optional but nice and hard to find DOS stuff, even if personally don't use it that often (if at all). BTW, I think the iBiblio mirror for FreeDOS is over 6 GB these days (probably due to big distros and lots of older versions of stuff). No idea what a full DJGPP mirror would take (rr? any guess?). Or even how big Simtel's /msdos/ is or (defunct) Garbo, etc. And yes, I prefer small size, but not everyone else does. So there's always room for improvement. -- Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] hard drive question?
We are far off topic now and I probably should not admit this but ... I've installed both DOS 3.3 and DOS 5 on the same machine lately. And yes, I had to use 32MB partitions. I wanted to be able to dual boot my machine (a PCjr, 1983) to both operating systems. DOS 3.3 uses an earlier variant of FAT16, which is only good up to 32MB. The FAT16 that everybody else is familiar with is more correctly called FAT16B, and that allows for partitions up to 2GB. To be able to have both DOS 3.3 and DOS 5 keep the same view of drive letters, both are installed in a primary partition and use an extended partition with the older version of FAT16 being used on some logical drives to hold common data. I wrote a little command line boot manager to hide the partition that is not in use so that drive letters don't shift. (DOS 3.3 can't see the DOS 5 partition, but if the DOS 3.3 partition is not hidden DOS 5 will see it.) Assuming a more recent machine (last 10 years?) DOS using a normal INT13 BIOS can see up to 8GB of a drive. To see more you need extended INT13 BIOS function. I think that 8GB is more than enough for any DOS system I'm ever going to run ... Mike PS: At some point I have to get FreeDOS running on the PCjr. -- Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FDNPKG: FreeDOS network package manager
I noted that FDNPKG is using WatTCP - I don't see that as a problem. While I prefer mTCP and I think it has many advantages (speed, size, bug fixes, etc.) WatTCP works well enough and people are comfortable with it. I also have a slight bias, so I am trying to be objective. ; - 0 The offline repository problem seems as though it should be easily handled - if the TCP stack does not initialize, it should return a bad return code. That way the main program can continue if desired. mTCP does this correctly - is the WatTCP program doing something anti-social like calling exit and killing the program outright? Regarding the makefile errors - I do not compile in DOS. My preferred DOS machine is an 80386DX-40 and compiling using OpenWatcom crushes that machine. It is far more productive to work in Windows or Linux and cross compile for 16 bit DOS. I was unaware that there was a problem with the makefiles - I am willing to simplify them to make them work with OpenWatcom under DOS if there is a need, but this was the first time I have heard that there is a problem. (I am also willing to modify FDNPKG to use mTCP as an experiment if there is a possibility that it might use mTCP long term.) Mike -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDos in VirtualBox not a sure thing
John, Just to make sure I understand ... You are running a batch file that is doing net use to setup printer shares, a file share, and loads nansi.sys. And the output to the screen during that time is around 8.5 chars per second? Just as a comparison, running the FreeDOS Beta of 1.1 under VirtualBox I can go to c:\fdos\doc\mtcp and execute type ftpsrv.txt. The entire time to watch that 37KB file scroll by is around 7 seconds, or about 5200 chars per second including the scrolling time. (The time to scroll is longer than the time to print chars.) Is VirtualBox slow because of what you are doing in those batch files, or is it slow no matter what you do? For example, try my little test there and see how fast it goes. We need to isolate what is causing your slowdown. And please try this with both TSRs and device drivers loaded and without so that we can see if it is a TSR or device driver problem. I have never heard of something that slow before in VirtualBox. As an alternative, you can try VMWare to see if it is something specific to VirtualBox. (I have found problems in VirtualBox before related to programs that reprogram the programmable interrupt timer. The mTCP PING program exposed it. It only affected PING while it was running.) RAM should not be the issue. But laptop hardware tends to throttle the speed if it is not plugged into the wall and allowed to run at full speed. I doubt this is your problem, but just in case, please clarify that the laptops are on wall power and are set to run at maximum CPU speed while on wall power. FDAPM and APMDOS are only introduced as a way to conserve battery power or reduce electricity consumption when used with wall power. Which reduces heat, which is always a good thing ... mTCP requires its own network adapter and can not co-exist with MS-Client. The same is true for WATTCP based applications. If you are trying to use both the MS-Client and mTCP or WATTCP programs at the same time on the same adapter then you need to add another adapter. Each of those programs assumes that they own the adapter and will fight each other in fun ways. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDos in VirtualBox not a sure thing
John, Maybe you could help us by being very specific with what worked and what went wrong? The only thing I could gather from your message was that it was difficult to do, and it was slow. One thing that is essential for good performance is to ensure that your host machine is new enough to support the virtual processor extensions in the CPU. If it does not, then the virtual machine gets emulated one instruction at a time. This is orders of magnitude slower than if you can use the virtual processor extensions. My 3 year old Intel i5 Quad Core chip is fine, but modern Atom processors do not have the extensions. Any virtual machine (FreeDOS or otherwise) will be painful without them. It sounds like your machine has the processor extensions, but you need to ensure they are enabled in the BIOS. Even if you do not use the power saving TSRs or programs that are power aware, the worst that will happen is that the virtual machine running FreeDOS will use one of the host CPU cores. For a desktop system this is not a major problem. On a laptop it will shorten battery life. You have a wide variety of TSRs to choose from - FDAPM and DOSIDLE are my favorites so far. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] OT: Good discussion groups for ASM, C or C++
You sent your query to the freedos-user list. Are you subscribed to freedos-devel too? If not, then you should. Another great resource is the forums at BTTR software: http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum.php And one more link - the programming area of the Vintage-computer forum: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/forumdisplay.php?18-Vintage-Computer-Programming Mike On 7/30/2012 11:39 AM, the bcpino wrote: Hello! Excuse me if I write to this list with this OT. I am learning to write code in DOS assembler (nasm and jwasm, mostly). I know this group is EXCELLENT for DOS users old a new, but not that much for DOS developers (sorry just my opinion, there may be another one related to this one) What about C and C++ too ? I think I already know C and C++ standard libraries, but not i86.h or dos.h ones. Do you know where I can find one good discussion group for assembler or C/C++ DOS-developers? Thanks! Bcpino -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Licensing and copyleft (Was: Re: FreeDOS compatibility with DOS applications
I'm missing something here. The big restriction that a GPL license imposes is copyleft. If you use GPL code *AND* you distribute your work then you have to make your source code available too. You can profit from your work and the work of others but you can't hide your changes. In the case of an author making a change to GPLed work (and distributing it) that just means they need to make their changes available, usually as a patch. Presumably the author benefited from having the original work available and it is quite reasonable for them to continue the chain of generosity. Anything that propagates the golden rule is a good thing. Other licenses may be more free in that they have less restrictions, including the copyleft. Microsoft benefited when they picked up the BSD derived TCP/IP code and applications and didn't have to pass any changes along. That's great for them, but that's not the kind of commercial activity I want to support. If somebody uses open source code, they should be willing to show their changes for others to build on. I have been a user of open source code (GPL) for over 20 years now starting with early versions of gcc. Before I released my own code under the GPL v3 I was paid by a major corporation with three initials to write open source code, usually under GPL2. That same corporation was a major player in open source and spent a lot of time making sure they complied with the rules, including redistribution of changes. It works for them and it works for a lot of other people. I find it hard to imagine how something so simple gets twisted up in meta discussions. Show me where somebody was harmed by the copyleft provisions of GPL licenses .. and not just having their feelings hurt. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Licensing and copyleft (Was: Re: FreeDOS compatibility with DOS applications
Overly pedantic. The thread title stopped matching the thread contents a few replies ago - it has not discussed FreeDOS compatibility in the recent replies. It has devolved into an open source licensing meta discussion. It is a meta discussion by most reasonable measures, and I changed the topic in my reply to reflect that. I am quite happy working with GPLed code. I also fully respect the right of other people to choose the license for their project that suits them. Arguing over levels of free is borderline silly - we're not talking about intellectual property that is going to change the world. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Licensing and copyleft (Was: Re: FreeDOS compatibility with DOS applications
On 7/6/2012 12:25 PM, C. Masloch wrote: I agree, I'm certainly overly pedantic and unreasonable and silly. And you're the one using the term intellectual property as if that was a coherent concept. =) I guess I don't understand that last message either. The purpose of all of these licenses is to protect the thought that goes into the code, and that is commonly recognized as intellectual property. You are willing to argue the finer points of each license and how it restricts the usage of the code (read: intellectual property), but do you mean to imply here that intellectual property is not a coherent concept? If so, why be pedantic over something that is not coherent? On that note, I'm going back to playing with my intellectual property. Sorry .. I meant code ... Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] network printing
Hi David, There are versions of DOS supplied with machines that have a mode command that can redirect the printer port. It might even be a standard feature of the mode command. But it is strictly a port change - instead of using the BIOS to send characters to the printer it uses the BIOS to send characters to the serial port. A TSR that hooks the BIOS calls and sends the data elsewhere is possible. There are existing TSRs that capture printer output and write it to a file. Often it's not just a matter of shoving the output to the printer over the network. In that one method discussed here that is exactly what happens. But for a Unix style printer queue that doesn't work at all. Mike small rant We really need more programmers. I've done my part to create a framework for writing TCP/IP and UDP applications. There are a lot of neat ideas floating around, but for one person it is like trying to boil the ocean. Can write code but you are not a DOS programmer yet? On the edge about how to get started? I can help ... /small rant -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] fdupdate
I have been blissfully unaware of the packaging requirements for FreeDOS. I update mTCP a few times a year, and I know that is a lot of work to get right. Is there a FAQ or notes on how FreeDOS manages packages? If I can make the mTCP updates easier I will. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS, pythond, and icmp
On 6/22/2012 2:01 PM, Bob Tanner wrote: Asking here as I cannot find any mailing list or new group for pythond. Looking for a reason why pythond under FreeDOS does not support the icmp protocol. PythonD 2.4.2r1 for DJGPP [GCC 3.3.2] on ms-dos5 import socket socket.getprotobyname(icmp) Traceback (most recent call last): File stdin, line 1, in ? socket.error: protocol not found socket.getprotobyname(udp) 17 Is this limitation in PythonD or FreeDOS? Thanks. I'm not familiar with djgpp under DOS, but it looks like it is using WATTCP32 for the networking support. It's possible that WATTCP doesn't give access to it's ICMP layer. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Networking
Marcos, As far as networking is concerned, I abuse my older machines all of time. I don't think you have a networking problem; I think it is a hardware problem, or very bad device driver settings. General failure reading drive C is a bad sign. I would make a new backup of that server hard drive (do not overwrite an existing backup in case the backup fails mid-way). After getting a good backup, I would try to dump the SMART data on it and run some benchmarks or diagnostics. If the hard drive is having a hard time reading data then all sorts of secondary errors can happen as a result. Next is to inventory and review all of the hardware in the computer and make sure none of it is in conflict. Have a sound card? Pull it out ... you don't need it in a server. Check the BIOS settings. That machine has to be absolutely stable before you start adding clients to it. What OS are you running? If you are running some early form of Windows, then ditch it. You can do better with a current (or recent, but not new) Linux running with a text console. My old Linux boxes share using SAMBA just fine, and Linux is robust and easier to diagnose when hardware or software is misbehaving. Next, you need to start testing the clients and the servers together. It's hard to imagine that the clients are putting such a huge load on the server that the server is glitching - file sharing is not CPU intensive. But you want to do this in a test environment, not with the real database that everybody is using! Setup some batch files to copy and compare files to ensure that the files are not getting corrupted and to generate some load against the server. Remember, a low end Pentium machine can easily saturate a 10Mb/sec Ethernet by itself. That's almost 1MB a second of file transfer capability if you are using TCP/IP. If you have Pentium gear you probably have 100Mb/sec hardware, so that number is closer to 10 times more. Are your clients accessing this database really generating 1MB or more of data per second? I'd be interested to hear your results. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP 2012-05-30 is available
It has been a while and I've accumulated a lot of changes and fixes. Here is what you can look forward to: * Power awareness for virtual machines and laptops *IRCjr fixes to improve compatibility with more servers *Howto style documentation for setting up SLIP and PPP with mTCP *FTPSrv requires significantly less RAM *FTPSrv can be made to exclude certain drive letters *Telnet now supports Xmodem and Ymodem uploads and downloads *More newline handling fixes for Telnet (I think I got it right this time!) *The FTP client will send files much faster now - 10 to 34% has been measured Everything is available at http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ . Enjoy! Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Setting up a shared printer
On 5/7/2012 6:32 PM, dmccunney wrote: On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Michael B. Brutman mbbrut...@brutman.com wrote: Netcat is one of the best kept secrets in the world of networking. You can use it to send email, printer files, or any arbitrary data from one machine to another machine. Not that well kept a secret in the *nix world. As it happens, I know the original author. He's spending his time hacking his Prius and doing lighting design these days. Send him my regards. : - ) (And my apologies - I have not implemented UDP in my version yet.) Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Setting up a shared printer
If your network attached printer is listening on TCP/IP port 9100 (HP JetDirect protocol) and your DOS program can generate something the printer can understand, then do the following: - Print your printer output to a file - Send the file to the printer using this command: nc -target printer address 9100 -bin filename Substitute printer address with the IP address of your printer and filename with the filename your program generated when you said print to file. For example, on my printer: nc -target 192.168.2.20 9100 -bin testfile.txt Will print testfile.txt over the network to the printer. (testfile.txt gets redirected on stdin to netcat.) Here is the fine print: Most new network attached printers will listen on port 9100. Yours might not. If it does nothing then it might be listening on the Unix LPD port (515) or the IPP port (631). Just try it, nothing bad will happen. Your DOS program has to generate output that your printer understands. That is usually some form of PCL output. Some printers can take raw ASCII text, some more expensive printers can do PostScript, and some cheap and nasty printers require Windows and can't do anything by themselves. If you have a printer that does not do ASCII, PostScript, or PCL and requires a Windows machine to do anything, it won't work for you. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Setting up a shared printer
On 5/6/2012 4:10 PM, nospam wrote: Very interesting. I suggest you make a FreeDOS Wiki page from this information. Georg It is just a trick that I found. I was waiting to do a more comprehensive writeup on network printing until after I write an LPR daemon. Netcat is one of the best kept secrets in the world of networking. You can use it to send email, printer files, or any arbitrary data from one machine to another machine. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Next mTCP release (2012) - wish lists and ideas?
On 4/26/2012 10:18 PM, jasse...@itelefonica.com.br wrote: My wishes: 1) Support for class 6 packet drivers 2) TCP/IP packet logging capability 3) A TSR version Best regards, JAS 1) mTCP does not support serial (class 6) directly. But DOSPPP can be used with mTCP and I have used one of the SLIP drivers for testing. The trick is to tell the packet driver to emulate Ethernet over the serial link. I have a very detailed TXT file in the next version that describes using DOSPPP with mTCP and a Linux machine as the gateway. You can have this earlier if you need it - send me an email offline. 2) Every mTCP application has a debug mode that can be turned on by an environment variable that logs the contents of packets it is working with, including parsing out some of the IP and TCP headers. Are you looking for something more like tcpdump or a general purpose packet sniffer? 3) A TSR would be a different project. The design trade-offs that I made work well for a statically compiled library, but probably not for a TSR. (The library can make use of lots of buffer space and has performance features that I would not try to put in a TSR.) Regards, Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Next mTCP release (2012) - wish lists and ideas?
On 4/21/2012 5:44 AM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros wrote: snip Also, it would be nice if mTCP became FDAPM-aware. Regards *and* thanks, Marcos Marcos, I'm testing this now. With FDAPM set to APMDOS VirtualBox is idling. Before I made the change it was chewing up an entire CPU. I still have some tweaks to make - the FTP client sitting at the command line is polling the keyboard, which is driving CPU usage. But the other apps are behaving properly. FDAPM is picking up on my use of 'int 28'. For DOSBox and SwsVPkt I'm also using int 2F/1680 which is the give up my time slice interrupt for environments that are multi-tasking aware. Mike -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Next mTCP release (2012) - wish lists and ideas?
Marcos, A network drive letter similar to the Microsoft LAN client would be great, but that is a major undertaking - far larger in effort than the FTP server, which was the last major addition. That is not coming any time soon - it might as well be a separate project for the amount of work it requires. (That code also looks very different than all of the existing code; a TSR that mucks with the DOS drive letter chain and uses the undocumented network redirector interface. Some coding samples like vmsmount exist, but it is still not trivial.) Making mTCP more CPU power aware - I went down this path and there are #defines in the code for some of it. I chose not to implement it because there was confusion on how to do it across all of the platforms (older versions of PC DOS like 2.x, newer versions of DOS, DOSBox, and VMWare/VirtualBox) without having to do separate compiles or sophisticated run-time detection. That could still make it in the short term, but I need to do a lot of testing on a variety of machines. Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Next mTCP release (2012) - wish lists and ideas?
I am looking for wish lists items, bug reports, and ideas for the next release of mTCP. The current version is about six months old now. I haven't had too many bug reports so there has not been a great need to update it. That is also the release that FreeDOS 1.1 chose to use, so it has seen quite a wide distribution. (Close to 1,000 downloads were recorded at the hosting site, and that doesn't count the FreeDOS users.) The following things are going into the next release already: - Xmodem and Ymodem file transfers through Telnet - Misc telnet fixes (new line handling, telnet binary mode, etc.) - Reduced FTP server memory utilization (30 to 40kb) - A minor PING fix (the outgoing packet length was too long) - Additional documentation: a detailed guide to using PPP over serial (including setting up the Linux gateway) Here is what might happen depending on how much effort I can put in: -A first pass at a Gopher client. (Started, but not usable yet) -LPR (remote printing to network printers using Unix/Linux LPR queues) - A setup style program for configuring the mTCP configuration file - A diagnostics program to look for packet drivers in memory and report their details (Started) - Library routines and a sample program to send email using SMTP - TCP library - implement Karne's algorithm for timeout and retransmitting packets If you have an idea let me know. I can't get to everything, but if the idea is good it will definitely get priority. Small tweaks to the existing code are always possible to. -Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Long-term survival of FreeDOS
On 4/11/2012 5:21 AM, Alex wrote: This is exactly the sort of nightmarish scenario I was worrying about!! I was hoping that someone would point out how foolish my worries were, but now they appear to be not so foolish after all... As an end user, your fears are probably foolish. Emulation and virtualization work fine for anybody playing with DOS at the application level. DOS as a platform for embedded computing using generic PCs might be more of a problem. There will come a day when a new generic PC will not boot the current versions of DOS that we know and love. People using DOS that way will probably move to more suitable embedded environments before that time comes. Mike -- Better than sec? Nothing is better than sec when it comes to monitoring Big Data applications. Try Boundary one-second resolution app monitoring today. Free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-dev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Programming languages in FreeDOS
On 4/11/2012 1:25 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Michael B. Brutman mbbrut...@brutman.com wrote: For hard-core application programming where you need to use a few BIOS and DOS interrupts I like to use C and C++ (carefully). C gives you a tremendous amount of control and flexibility. Open Watcom is open source and is regularly updated, but it is loosing critical mass. It seems to be a fairly well kept secret, which I don't understand. OpenWatcom is awesome, but ... 1). It's only OSI approved, not FSF approved. (Yeah, I know.) 2). No shared library support on GNU/Linux. 3). 32-bit max. only, no 64-bit (except unfinished Alpha support). 4). incomplete C99, a fair bit less than latest GCC 5). slightly less target optimizations (but still good) So that's my guess why more people don't use it. 1) No comment. 2) If you are programming for GNU/Linux, using OpenWatcom is insane when you have GCC/GLIBC available. We are talking about DOS here, right? Not being able to support shared libraries on GNU/Linux is not a concern. 3) The ability to generate 16 and 32 bit code for DOS is what is relevant for FreeDOS. If somebody needs 64 bit registers and pointers then it's probably time to migrate to a 64 bit OS. 4) The latest GCC doesn't generate code for 16/32 bit DOS. As for loosing critical mass, it's not dead yet, though Google Groups isn't letting people post to the OpenWatcom groups anymore (too much spam??), so you have to use something else (e.g. Opera and connect directly to news.openwatcom.org or use Eternal September, aioeu, etc). Having their own news server is a plus - you are not bound by what newsgroups your ISP wants to carry, if they carry anything at all. There supposedly will be a 2.0 release later this year, but the maintainer (Peter Chapin) has been busy with other things (work?), hence the delay from last time (1.9, approx. 2 years ago). Peter is stepping down as the project maintainer. He's been very busy apparently ... Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Long-term survival of FreeDOS
On 4/11/2012 1:38 PM, John Wesley Cooper wrote: On 4/11/2012 6:14 AM, Michael B. Brutman wrote: As an end user, your fears are probably foolish. Emulation and virtualization work fine for anybody playing with DOS at the application level. Application-level? But doesn't DOS more or less give an application (nearly) unfettered access to the hardware? Also, despite much trouble and time, I've yet to get DOS (of any form) to run stably in a VM, though I do have no doubt that it can be done … advice please? People who insist on running WordPerfect 5.1 or games will be fine. I fall into that category. People who need to run dedicated hardware that is timing dependent might have some difficulty - those are what I classify as the embedded system style users. I don't understand your inability to run in a VM. I use IBM DOS 5, IBM DOS 6.22, and FreeDOS 1.x in both VirtualBox and VMWare on a regular basis with no major problems. VirtualBox had a timer bug that my ping code exposed; I haven't checked to see if it is fixed yet. To help you get it running - what are the symptoms? Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Long-term survival of FreeDOS
On 4/11/2012 2:34 PM, Alex wrote: Sorry but I still don't find the above comments very reassuring, with regard to the future usability of (Free)DOS on new hardware. The fact that we will be able to run DOS in emulators/virtual machines, because we can no longer boot it, is no reason at all for being reassured. In fact, such a state of affairs is rather sad and paradoxical, and in such a scenario I don't even see the point of using DOS in the first place (apart from running DOS games). To me, at least, DOS is something that today is still useful because it gives you control over the machine, it is lean and unbloated, and provides you with a simple, uncluttered environment. Now, if we have to resort to using a virtual machine for running DOS, this frankly seems to defeat the purpose. So, alas, my fears stand. Ok - lots of hand wringing. What's your plan? Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos 1.1 install errors...
On 4/3/2012 1:18 AM, Michael Robinson wrote: There is a syntax error message that flashes before the where to install freedos to and from menu comes up. Another problem, install freezes at installing command.com. Uge! Are you installing on old hardware or in a virtual machine? Some of us figured out that on ancient hardware (8088, 80286, etc.) the decompression process takes a long time. If you are running in a virtual machine and your underlying hardware/operating system does not fully support virtualization then you are emulating the machine instruction by instruction, and that can take forever too. My 2009 vintage Intel quad-core supports virtualzation well so I have very little instruction emulation. But a user with a newer Atom tried it and noticed the horrible slowdown. Apparently the Atom isn't fully capable of virtualization so QEMU was resorting to emulating each instruction, and that is very slow. Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Arachne Troubles
On 4/8/2012 8:46 PM, Kenny Emond wrote: Hey, I was finnaly able to find a packet driver for my DOS computer (ethernet connection), but for some reason Arachne shows the main page, but when I try to go to a different page, it brings up a roadrunner search thing. I tried to edit the wattcp.cfg file, like so: my_ip = dhcp netmask = 255.255.255.0 gateway = 192.168.0.1 domain_list = www.rr.com http://www.rr.com/ I had to use our mac to find out our router ip (it was under dhcp as router). I put the ip under the gateway section, which I don't know was correct. Anyway, it didn't really work, so I'm at a loss of what to do next. Arachne is at least able to connect, so I did something right. Also, what does the mtcp.cfg file do? I know it has to do with ping and other such things, but how do I use it? And how did it look originally (I accidently did something and it made the file blank)? Any help on any of these questions would be wonderful. Thanks! --- A FreeDOS User P.S.- Please don't use any info I gave you to hack me or something like that. I'm doing this on the honour system. Thanks! Again! I don't think anybody is going to try to hack your DOS box. But if they did, would it be a Denial of Service attack (DoS) on a DOS box? (Sorry, bad networking joke.) I can't comment on Arachne - web browsing in DOS is way above my head. However, keep in mind that the mTCP configuration file (the name varies but it is pointed at by the MTCPCFG environment variable) is unrelated to the WATTCP.CFG file used by Arachne. mTCP and WATTCP are two different TCP/IP stacks and sets of applications. The mTCP package includes a DHCP client, PING, SNTP, Telnet client, FTP client, etc. Arachne is one of the programs using WATTCP. For details on setting up mTCP and getting the configuration file back to a good state see setup.txt somewhere in one of the documentation directories. Here is a link to the online version: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/setup.txt At a minimum you need to tell mTCP what software interrupt the packet driver is using. This is all explained in the setup instructions. Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Arachne Troubles
On 4/8/2012 10:00 PM, cordat...@aol.com wrote: FreeDOS User ... If WATTCP is working correctly you don't need the other lines in your config file beyond my_ip=dhcp as they are filled in if DHCP works. As has been discussed here before some versions of WATTCP support DHCP and some don't. My guess is that yours does support DHCP since if you didn't have an IP you could not get to the roadrunner search. You mention MTCP.CFG -this is the config file for MTCP, not WATTCP. The two packages are very similar but they have different configuration files. WATTCP and MTCP differ in that WATTCP will provide DHCP services within each application (like Arachne) while MTCP has a stand-alone DHCP program which then updates a config file and all other MTCP apps (like Ping or FTP) assume that the IP is static. One way to remove some uncertainty from your WATTCP configuration is to adopt the MTCP DHCP method. In order to do this you would have a very basic MTCP config file (I think the minimum is the interrupt vector - would be nice if this were not needed :-) and then run the MTCP DHCP program. Everything from your DHCP server (ie your router) will get dumped into the MTCP config file as well as show on your screen. You can then update your WATTCP config file to match. This can be automated in one of a couple of ways I can share with you if you are interested. Correct - each WATTCP based application gets a DHCP address each time it starts. This approach handles short leases better, but it leads to bigger executables. mTCP basically cheats and keeps the executables smaller by making DHCP a separate step in a separate program. Cordata - you could give him the utility you wrote that parses the mTCP config file and fixes up the WATTCP file. (I'd like to see that bundled with mTCP one day.) Another option is a utility by Dave Dunfield at http://www.dunfield.com/doswid/index.htm called DHCP. It is a DHCP client that can configure both mTCP and WATTCP, and it is smaller than my own DHCP client for mTCP. Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Programming languages in FreeDOS
For hard-core application programming where you need to use a few BIOS and DOS interrupts I like to use C and C++ (carefully). C gives you a tremendous amount of control and flexibility. My two favorite compilers are: Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS: I did most of my early mTCP work. It really needs a 386 or faster machine to run on, but it generates 16 bit code as well as 32 bit code. This particular version is stuck in time (1992) so if you need to access new opcodes on later processors you need to use inline assembler. I'm sure the later versions of this that run under Windows and the professional versions (those don't use the Turbo word in the name) are comparable, but with more bells and whistles. Code optimization is not great. But the run-time library is fairly compact. Open Watcom: The run-time library is a bit heavier than the library in Turbo C++, but it includes some newer functions that are missing from Turbo C++. The code optimization is generally better. The compiler itself can be run under DOS, Windows or Linux and all versions can cross-compile and create code for other platforms. (On my Windows XP machine I create 16 bit DOS applications and 32 bit Windows test programs.) Open Watcom is daunting compared to Turbo C++ but the rewards are worth it. Open Watcom is open source and is regularly updated, but it is loosing critical mass. It seems to be a fairly well kept secret, which I don't understand. (PS: If we have FreeDOS code that doesn't compile under OW I'd be interested in seeing it. A few #defines can fix a lot of problems. The debugging is the hard part.) Mike -- For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] howto on a 286
On 2/13/2012 6:06 AM, kqt4a...@gmail.com wrote: I am connected!!! I used the Intel EtherExpress/16 packet driver from crynwr.com Now, how do I go about getting apps to use dns and is there such a thing as a host table Richard What are you using? If it is mTCP there is a nameserver setting in the configuration file you can use so that DNS names get resolved. If you are trying to reach a machine where there is no DNS server (a local network machine maybe) then use the IP address. The documentation spells all of this out. The WATTCP apps also have a configuration setting for DNS but I'm not as familiar with those. Mike -- Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] howto on a 286
On 2/12/2012 11:42 AM, kqt4a...@gmail.com wrote: I took a different approach I downloaded the latest iso, moved the Tandy harddrive to a pc, and installed Now I have the Tandy up on FreeDOS One itch to scratch is when I run dir I get Press any key to continue after every single line Next I have a Intel 8/18TP Lan Adapter and I have no idea how to go about setting up networking on dos I have spent 18 years working on UNIX Richard The Intel 8/16 adapter should work on most machines. Look for a packet driver for that particular card. A packet driver is a TSR that serves as the device driver for a specific network card. It presents a common high level interface that DOS networking code can then use. This writeup might be helpful: http://brutman.com/Dos_Networking/packet_drivers.html Intel might have their old packet drivers on the web site. Another place to look is the Crynwr packet driver collect. Just search for Crynwr and you'll find it. A packet driver only gives you a device driver capable of sending and receiving raw Ethernet frames. After that choose your software and configure accordingly. FreeDOS has some networking programs installed already. Without trying to show too much bias I would look at the mTCP programs - the home page is here: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP (Disclaimer: I wrote the code.) Mike -- Virtualization Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Bertho, I spoke from the point of view of the device (the hard drive) - if the hardware that the device is attached to chooses not to expose all of the options that the device supports, there is little the device can do about that. In the case of your external storage somebody made a design decision that 4KB blocks were more desirable, and in a lot of cases that is true. But I'm quite sure that the underlying devices (hard drives) will support 512 byte sector sizes in emulation for a very long time. To be able to share data on a hard drive directly between two different operating systems the format of the device and the layout of the filesystem on that device have to be understood by both operating systems. Linux and Windows have a clear advantage; there are lots of people working on them and they have the supporting code and operating system resources to do lots of transforms on the data. We are more limited in DOS - DOS expects FAT or an installable filesystem (network redirector interface). If you give DOS a block device (whether through BIOS or device driver) DOS expects 512 byte blocks. (The network redirector interface is a higher level file interface, so it does not have such problems.) If you want to write a block device driver for DOS to use with FAT you can accommodate any physical sector size you want - as long as the device driver hides that and gives DOS 512 byte blocks, you will be fine. The network redirector interface can do magic - it is often used to take the 2048 byte blocks of a CD-ROM and the ISO filesystem on it and present it to DOS in a way that can be used by DOS. The important part is that it doesn't try to present a CD-ROM and the foreign filesystem on it (ISO) as a block device to DOS; it is a higher level installable filesystem interface. Given enough code, you can have an IFS driver to read EXT2, EXT3, NTFS, etc. So the bottom line is that DOS will probably work just fine when natively attached to storage devices, and that will work for a long time. Appliance storage devices are going to break that if they can't emulate 512 byte sectors. I'm not entirely sure that Linux or Windows will let you create a 512 byte FAT style filesystem on storage that is using larger sectors. If they can do that and you want to share data with them on your DOS system by directly reading the storage, then it's time to start writing some device drivers. ;-0 Mike -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Mar 27 - Feb 2 Save $400 by Jan. 27 Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
The list membership is not that large. You can assume that people are busy or don't know the answer. As far as 4K blocks go, I wouldn't worry about it too much. 512 byte sectors will be supported either natively or by emulation in the drive itself for a long time to come - at least 5 to 10 years. Too many existing systems depend on a 512 byte sector and manufacturers are more likely to demand reasonable 512 byte emulation from the hard drive makers than to do anything themselves. Mike -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Mar 27 - Feb 2 Save $400 by Jan. 27 Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Re : Support for 4k byte sectors
Hi Eric, I expect that in the next few years we'll see very large hard drives and they will continue to support 512 byte sector sizes - that is what the system manufacturers demand. The actual sector size of the drive might be 4KB but the drive will allow the host to choose a 512 byte or 4KB sector format and adjust accordingly. If 512 byte sectors are chosen and the drive is truly using 4KB it will do the proper read/modify/write sequence for writing random 512 byte blocks. For reads and sequential writes the performance impact will be negligible. Random writes present the biggest challenge - better drives will be able to minimize the performance impact. Most of us run with write caching enabled which also helps the performance problem that random writes cause. From an operating system point of view things are more complicated. The classic partitoning scheme doesn't work well on giant drives. You are better versed in the newer partition table schemes than I am. We might just have to live within the limits of a 2TB device if we don't want to fix the problem. I think I can live in 2TB for my DOS systems ... In the early days of DOS device drivers often had to deal with sector sizes that were not 512 bytes. I have an Iomega Bernoulli Box A220 (2 8 cartridges holding 20MB each) that uses 256 byte sectors, and the device driver is responsible for dealing with that. I think even the later Adaptec ASPI drivers know how to work with SCSI devices that report 256 byte sectors. If we ever have to deal with this issue in the kernel I would be inclined to continue to use a 512 byte sector size within the OS and hide any differences at the lowest levels. This might not be as efficient as supporting different sector sizes natively but that probably becomes too complicated and error-prone. There is a lot of code that assumes 512 byte sector sizes and it is not worth disturbing it. I'm going to get flamed for this but I'm not too worried about the performance hit that translation layers cause. FreeDOS is *insanely* mismatched for modern hardware, and there is plenty of performance overhead available to dip into. Anybody who really needs the speed should step up to a more modern operating system. We're not making use of the hardware we have already and we're probably a decade or two late in trying to keep up with advances in hardware. Mike -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Mar 27 - Feb 2 Save $400 by Jan. 27 Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] data type length problem
On 12/11/2011 11:55 PM, David Griffith wrote: On Sun, 11 Dec 2011, Ralf A. Quint wrote: At 09:36 PM 12/11/2011, Ralf A. Quint wrote: How can I get this code to do the Right Thing? Actually just realized that it's pretty easy, you just need to typecast properly all parts of the makeid macro: Ugh! how'd I miss something like that? This revelation may come in handy when dealing with some uint32 types. Just another general rule for good C code - mark your constants if they are large. For example: #define CONNECT_TMEOUT_MS (5ul) That does not work in your case, but it looks nicer than repeated casting. The compiler wants to 'think' 16 bits, because that is what it is good at. It can do 32 bits, but it has to be forced to do so. Whenever you are doing mixed 16 and 32 bit computations start casting upward like crazy. Mike -- Learn Windows Azure Live! Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011 Microsoft is holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers. It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides. You can attend the event by watching it streamed LIVE online. Learn more at http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-windowsazure ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] re-porting Frotz to DOS
Rugxulo, I could have looked up Z machine - was just pressed for time this morning. I try not to sound willfully ignorant. ;-0 (Which reminds me - I wanted to do a telnet server that used the Zork virtual machine as a proof of concept. Now I know where to go start when I find the time. Zork on the internet via Telnet! Eliza would be another good one.) Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 is not freeware, but I don't think it is hard to find. I have sold a few copies that I personally rescued from the trash in the past year or two for a nominal amount. It runs well on a 386 or 486 and is easy to use. Look for a copy on eBay, the Vintage Computer Marketplace, etc. It can be used without the manuals by somebody with a little experience. Open Watcom is open source and readily available but it is quite overwhelming for a newbie. It took me a while to get over my fear of it, and I had plenty of experience with TC++, gcc, IBM's xlC, etc. But I'm happy I made the switch. Jim Leonard is a Turbo Pascal bigot. I think he's stuck in the mid 80s. :-) To be fair I think he uses it as a loader for his assembler code. Any reasonable compiler and development setup is probably best run on a 386 or better machine, unless you are using something like Turbo Pascal 3.0. TP 3.0 actually ran well on the oldest hardware, and fit too. Most of the C compilers have just too big of a footprint. As much as I like my PCjr and 5150/5160s, I still do most of my development work on a Windows XP machine and I test in DOSBox or a virtual machine. I did most of the mTCP development work on a 386-40, but my current setup is far more productive. (And all of this reminds me that I need to do a series of web pages or a Wiki on getting started programming in DOS. It is a dying art ...) Mike -- Cloud Services Checklist: Pricing and Packaging Optimization This white paper is intended to serve as a reference, checklist and point of discussion for anyone considering optimizing the pricing and packaging model of a cloud services business. Read Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51491232/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDos4Kids (and Kids-at-heart)
Hi Eric, I don't have a lot of experience myself, but a lot of my fellow hackers who specialize in obsolete machines have reported problems with CF cards. While CF cards are supposed to emulate IDE devices, a lot of the newer ones do not support CHS addressing and do not work in older machines. The DOM style products are designed to be drop-in replacements, so there will not be an issue. Older CF cards generally work as IDE substitutes. Newer ones may not. On the topic of wear leveling I would go with the DOM products, as they are designed as hard drive replacements. It's pretty easy to burn up FLASH so wear leveling is important. Mike -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDos4Kids (and Kids-at-heart)
Andrew, You should look for a product called Disk On Module. They are composed of FLASH chips and are designed to be direct replacements for IDE hard drives. Unlike a lot of CF cards that can be used with an CF to IDE adapter but might not support CHS addressing, DOMs are designed as IDE replacements so they do proper wear leveling and will fully emulate an IDE device, including both CHS and LBA addressing. (A lot of newer CF cards only do LBA addressing.) I replaced a dead 60MB laptop hard drive with a 512MB DOM. It was smaller, takes less power, has more capacity, and has no moving parts. DOMs come in both 40 and 44 pin varieties and range in size from 32MB to 4 or 8GB. Assuming the BIOS of your machine can autodetect hard drives, using a DOM as a replacement for a hard drive should be easy. Some early machines restrict the choice of hard drive by hard coding the BIOS to only accept certain models; those BIOSes need to be patched. But a conventional IDE BIOS should work fine with a DOM. Mike -- RSA#174; Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now#33; http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Security
On 10/25/2011 4:25 PM, Koh Choon Lin wrote: Does that means FreeDOS would not be able to support multiplayer network DOS games like Doom, CC, etc.. which MSDOS is able to do so with ethernet? For most of your questions, FreeDOS is equivalent to PC DOS or MS DOS. So however you use those, FreeDOS should be able to work too. All versions of DOS are single user systems with no concept of user IDs, and no concept of security. If you can get to the keyboard, you can use it and do whatever you want to it. Any program that you run has full control of the entire machine. There is no process protection, user ownership of files, etc. DOS really has no concept of built-in networking either. All networking code is an add-on for DOS. So the question Does DOS have security? really should be Do the network aware programs that I am going to run under DOS have security? because DOS doesn't know about security or networks. So what is it that you are trying to do? If you are just going to have a DOS machine in your house to play network Doom, then don't worry, you don't have security problems. If you are going to do something else network related then it depends on the program. Running FTP and Telnet on modern networks is a problem because those send passwords in the clear on the wire, which can be dangerous on the open Internet. Mike -- The demand for IT networking professionals continues to grow, and the demand for specialized networking skills is growing even more rapidly. Take a complimentary Learning@Cisco Self-Assessment and learn about Cisco certifications, training, and career opportunities. http://p.sf.net/sfu/cisco-dev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] 4th-Grade English.
Jack, [1] Not everybody on the list is a native English speaker. [2] You need to calm down. The tone of many of your postings is borderline hostile. -Mike -- The demand for IT networking professionals continues to grow, and the demand for specialized networking skills is growing even more rapidly. Take a complimentary Learning@Cisco Self-Assessment and learn about Cisco certifications, training, and career opportunities. http://p.sf.net/sfu/cisco-dev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Pat Villani on Wikipedia (was: Re: Another IT person passed away...)
On 10/18/2011 4:50 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Well I finally did it. Took a few hours, and I really didn't know Pat well enough (online) to do him justice, but I sure tried very very hard. Well done. I've noticed that the FreeDOS page at Wikipedia has been updated quite a bit recently too - it was pretty thin and out of date the last time I checked. What is notable for us may not be notable for Wiki. We just have to live with that. My experience with notability requirements being overzealously enforced has led me to conclude it is just not worth the hassle. Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-oct ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Announce: vmsmount, a driver for mounting VMware's shared folders in DOS
On 10/13/2011 9:18 PM, Ralf A. Quint wrote: At 03:02 PM 10/13/2011, Eduardo Casino wrote: 2011/10/10 Ralf A. Quintfree...@gmx.net: At 01:38 PM 10/9/2011, Eduardo Casino wrote: Would you be so kind of testing it in one of your 286? It should fail with ERROR: Not running on top of VMWARE. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsmount/files/Test/ Will do. Unfortunately, the best machine to test it on, an IBM PS/2 Model 50Z is at the very bottom of a stack in my closet, have to pull it out later. I have two 286 clones easier accessible but realized last night that I did not get the matching EGA/Monochrome monitors out of my storage... Hi Ralf, I've just tested it inside fake86, a 8086 PC emulator (http://fake86.rubbermallet.org) and it produces an exception. I've then re-compiled using just 8086 instructions for main.c and kitten.c and leaving the pentium optimizations for the rest of the files and it works. And size is only increased by 6 bytes :) I'll fix it for the next release. Thanks, I got the IBM yanked out but then life happened and I haven't been able to get back to my workbench yet, will see that I can do this later tonight... Ralf I'll do my part and try it too - I have real 8088 class machines all over the place. ;-0 Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-oct ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Grr ... (Was: Re: mTCP-2011-10-01 is available
Excellent, and you are welcome! I am glad it is working this time around - I get embarrassed when I let broken code out. Some questions: For best performance the following should be set in the mTCP config file: MTU 1500 FTPSRV_FILEBUFFER_SIZE 16 FTPSRV_TCPBUFFER_SIZE 16 FTPSRV_PACKETS_PER_POLL 10 The default for the buffer sizes is 8; 16 makes it noticeably better. I'm assuming you can use MTU 1500 on your network - if it is pure Ethernet that would be safe and optimal. FTPSRV_PACKETS_PER_POLL has a very low default and it could be restricting performance. Your machine is fast enough so setting it to 10 should be fine. What settings do you have at the moment, and can you try these settings and send me new numbers? You are correct - Datalight Sockets is at a disadvantage because of the TSR approach, but you can still use your machine while it is running. :-) WATT32 should have the advantage of being able to use more memory for buffering, but it clearly can't run on an 8088. Most people don't want to use an 8088 anyway .. Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Grr ... (Was: Re: mTCP-2011-10-01 is available
On 10/5/2011 7:27 PM, Alain Mouette wrote: I had problems with networking in dos for a few users, a short time ago. After a lot of headache, I discovered that those were conections via ADSL that used PPPoE, which has a 28 bytes overhead. So now I use MTU=1472 and I had no more problems ever since. I recommend to anyone, use 1472 to avoid problems. :) Alain Ah, interesting! I should put that tip in the user notes. I set a default of 576, which is the minimum that a gateway must support. SLIP and PPP users often must use less. I probably should work on a utility to do some MTU path discovery to diagnose problems like that. Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Grr ... (Was: Re: mTCP-2011-10-01 is available
Sorry everybody .. the FTP Server was tragically broken under FreeDOS. I have coded a workaround for some bad drive detection code that I put in and uploaded a new release of mTCP. Thanks go to Ulrich, Eric and Ralf for reporting the problem and helping me debug it. (I don't fully understand why the original drive detection code failed - it should have just ignored network drives, but it ignored *all* drives. I'll get to the bottom of that this weekend.) Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FTP Server testing needed
On 10/1/2011 11:09 AM, Jim Hall wrote: I uploaded my file successfully, but wasn't able to complete my download: Jim, Please try it again - we have a common enemy, and it is my ISP. I've tested this with files as large as 170MB under DOS 5. I'm sure it will work if the connection stays up. Mike -- All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP-2011-10-01 is available
You've probably seen enough chatter already, so I'll keep this brief. The FTP server testing is done, and I've released a new version of mTCP. Most of the changes were improvements to the FTP server. IRCjr now allows the user to edit their input before sending it, and the default transfer mode for the FTP client is passive, which is a better choice for users behind firewalls. The binaries and source code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ . As always, please contact me for comments, suggestions for improvement, and bug reports. Mike -- All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FTP Server testing needed
Alex, Interesting bug. I thought that this would be an easy catch, but it is more subtle than I thought. I can't recreate it here. Your client sends a PASV command before attempting to put the file, which is the correct behavior. Under normal circumstances that just tells the server to start listening on port for an incoming connection from your client. If a PORT command or another PASV command is issued that listening socket gets tossed away. In this case it is behaving like your client actually started connecting on that socket, or even connected. So there is an open data connection but no data flowing. And the next command (the dir or ls) requires a data connection, but it can't just blast the existing one. Hence the error message. I'm not sure what's going on, but I suspect that after about 10 seconds it would go away if it was just a connection that was starting. At worst case that session is hosed up until that user logs out. I'm going to keep looking at it, but it's not obvious. It's also probably been in the code since day one - you just got lucky enough to hit it. Mike On 9/29/2011 9:20 AM, Single Stage to Orbit wrote: On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 08:37 -0500, Michael B. Brutman wrote: I have made a large round of improvements to the FTP server in mTCP and I am looking for a little testing help with it. If you have a few spare moments over the next day or two just try to connect to it and browse the file structure. Using a few different clients will help me shake out any new bugs. Upload some relevant files if you are adventurous. Uploads to incoming doesn't quite work for me. Here's the transcript of my session: $ ftp -n -p 96.42.66.188 2021 Connected to 96.42.66.188 (96.42.66.188). 220 mTCP FTP Server ftp user anonymous 331 Anonymous ok, send your email addr as the password Password: 230-Welcome to Mike's PCjr running the mTCP FTP server! This machine 230-was released by IBM in 1983 and features a 4.77Mhz Nec V20 CPU (an 230-upgrade from the standard 8088), an XT-IDE modified for the PCjr, a 230-Western Digital 8003 Ethernet card, and a 20GB Maxtor hard drive. 230-It is running DOS 3.3 so most of the hard drive is not being used. 230-Please poke around, test things out, report any problems you might 230-have, and enjoy! Incoming files may be deposited at /incoming, and 230-you can create subdirectories there if needed.-Mike 230 User logged in ftp put alex_was_here local: alex_was_here remote: alex_was_here 227 Entering Passive Mode (96,42,66,188,11,76) 550 You need to be in the /INCOMING directory to upload ftp cd incoming 250 CWD command successful ftp put alex_was_here local: alex_was_here remote: alex_was_here 227 Entering Passive Mode (96,42,66,188,8,221) 550 Bad path ftp dir 425 Transfer already in progress Passive mode refused. ftp ls 425 Transfer already in progress Passive mode refused. ftp bye 221 Server closing connection Hope this helps -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] mTCP FTP server change
On 9/21/2011 9:48 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Why not imitate DJGPP instead? It's probably more familiar to people, e.g. /dev/c/ or /dev/d/ or whatever. Or use both (or not, whatever). ;-) I was given good advice to shorten it, so it might not be in the form of /drive_x/ but something more like just a single letter representing the drive. That seems reasonable. The DJGPP case probably is not a good idea, as it adds another level of path (/dev/) for no reason. Extra levels of path require extra levels of special code to keep the user from doing something goofy - I'll make my code look more like theirs when they run in 16 bits. ;-) This is kind of a big change so I'd like to see if anybody can spot any flaws in it ahead of time. I trust your decision, whatever it is. :-) The intent is to improve compatibility by hiding the fact it is on a FAT filesystem with drive letters, so I think this works. It does require some password file changes so there will be a little migration fixup to do. I'm also adding some detection code to figure out what drive letters are actually available, with media in them. That will keep people from tripping when they go to access the floppy drive and they are not at the console to answer Abort, Retry or Ignore? Right now FileZilla works, but lftp is broken. That is intolerable. ;-0 Mike -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP FTP server change
The current DOS path handling in the FTP server is kind of broken - it
works for some clients, but not for others. Ironically, the smarter the
FTP client the less likely it is to work.
The problem has to do with exposing drive letters in the path.
Filezilla in particular detects the drive letter and assumes DOS style
paths, with backslashes as the directory delimiter. If I use a drive
letter but use forward slashes in the FTP server Filezilla gets confused
but then the Unix clients are happy. There is no winning unless I start
putting some non-standard mode selection commands in.
The universal solution is to make everything look like a Unix
fileystem. To handle drive letters I'm thinking of using something like
/drive_x/ as the first part of the path. For example, if your current
working directory is / then you are at the root with no logged
drive. All you can do is see a list of available drives with each being
shown in /drive_x/ format. If you wanted to traverse the C: drive you
would go to /drive_c/ and work from there.
A side effect of this is that the root directory ('/') is virtual, and
really doesn't exist. When you are in the root directory you have to CD
to a drive letter or do a file list; there are no other file-type
commands you can use there.
This is kind of a big change so I'd like to see if anybody can spot any
flaws in it ahead of time. Users in a sandbox are not affected, as
they have always seen a Unix style path and have not been exposed to
drive letters.
Thanks,
Mike
--
All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a
definitive record of customers, application performance, security
threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1
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Re: [Freedos-user] Heads up: DOS ain't dead forum is closing
On 9/14/2011 6:14 AM, Zbigniew wrote: Most probably you can run on your multicore machine concurrent sessions of DOSBOX (or DOSEMU). modern hardware can emulate older hardware. Now you have a clean means of supporting modern hardware for people using old DOS applications. Want your multi function printer to appear as a standard printer, fax machine, and scanner? No problem. I'm not that sure - but someone of FreeDOS developers will surely know better, if it won't be any problem. But, actually, why you want another DOSBOX to be created? You've got already DOSBOX and DOSEMU... it's not enough? DOSBox is pretty close, but not perfect. It doesn't implement Ctrl-Break processing, loadable device drivers, etc. It is a good DOS emulation and it can be extended, as the HAL9000 builds do. (Those builds add the networking hardware emulation that I use.) Mike -- BlackBerryreg; DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA Learn about the latest advances in developing for the BlackBerryreg; mobile platform with sessions, labs more. See new tools and technologies. Register for BlackBerryreg; DevCon today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Heads up: DOS ain't dead forum is closing
Here is the link to the announcement: http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=10488 To me this is a serious problem - losing a piece of the DOS community is bad. Losing the place where a lot of the programmers hang out is even worse. Mike -- Using storage to extend the benefits of virtualization and iSCSI Virtualization increases hardware utilization and delivers a new level of agility. Learn what those decisions are and how to modernize your storage and backup environments for virtualization. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51434361/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Usefulness of DOS (Was: Re: Heads up: DOS ain't dead forum is closing
On 9/13/2011 7:10 PM, Michael C. Robinson wrote: Look at it this way, it is extremely hard to support modern hardware in a DOS style environment because DOS allowed application programs to use hardware directly. Jim Hall has said himself that he has limited interest in the GUI end and most people think a Windows 3.11 Workgroups compatible GUI is too much work. DOS is fast, but Linux stripped down properly is also fast. DOS is great for playing old games, and there are some popular applications for it. Thing is, DOS doesn't make sense at all in the multicore era as a primary operating system. DOS was needed when the personal computer wasn't powerful enough to support a more sophisticated operating system. I'd say that Freedos has it's uses, but without active development on a variant that can take advantage of multiple cores and modern hardware, there are probably a dwindling number of uses for it. Without hardware protection and memory protection, Freedos is certainly fast but probably not acceptable to everyone. Good reply, but to the wrong thread .. (I fixed the subject line in this reply.) Personal opinion only - I program on DOS for the challenge of it, and because it runs on those ancient machines I like to collect. There are very few instances where I want to use a general purpose DOS computer for daily living. The lack of hardware support has been brought up in other threads. We're slowly losing our ability to run on native hardware. Emulation of entire machines or just pieces of machines (BIOS) helps slow the rate of change down, but the trend line is not good. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to use a multi-core machine with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage for a single threaded single tasking OS with roots in 8 bit hardware from the 1970s. DOS enthusiasts can choose to remain on older hardware, live in emulation environments, or roll up their sleeves and try to keep it running on modern hardware. But that last option is kind of difficult to justify when Linux is so capable and is more than fast enough. Mike -- Using storage to extend the benefits of virtualization and iSCSI Virtualization increases hardware utilization and delivers a new level of agility. Learn what those decisions are and how to modernize your storage and backup environments for virtualization. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51434361/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] {Spam?} [OT] Problems in the ReactOS community...
Alerting us to the clashes in ReactOS serves to remind us of how good we have it here; the group is small and flare-ups are at a minimum. That being said, I don't think it is productive to keep making your case here; it is not a FreeDOS issue and it is not for us to judge who is right or wrong. Also, I don't think anybody is going to get on their IRC just to watch the fireworks. In the land of FreeDOS we have the following problems: - Hardware support on newer hardware - Improving the usefulness of our software in an age where expectations (and requirements) for software are so great - Growing (or at least holding) our users and staying relevant Regards, Mike -- Doing More with Less: The Next Generation Virtual Desktop What are the key obstacles that have prevented many mid-market businesses from deploying virtual desktops? How do next-generation virtual desktops provide companies an easier-to-deploy, easier-to-manage and more affordable virtual desktop model.http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51426474/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dos backups in the 21st century?
On 8/30/2011 1:46 AM, escape wrote: Great to hear, as mTCP becoming all-you-need-for-dos-networking solution. BTW what do you think about how hard it wiil be to implement DOS-based rsync server, even if feature-limited? I started looking at the rsync client - getting past the compiler and build system dependencies is a major chore. There are funny things like typedef int int in there that Watcom doesn't like; unraveling the macro pre-processor expansions to find the culprits takes time. I suspect that the change to use mTCP instead of Watcom will be far easier, but it takes a while to get to that point. Depending on the rest of the client, the speed difference may not be that great - that remains to be seen. (If it is mostly tied up in disk I/O or something cpu intensive then the TCP part might not make that much of a difference.) An rsync server? I need help ... there is not enough time in the world. (To that end I've been updating the Wiki documentation at the Google project hosting site - I've added a lot of design documentation lately.) On a slightly related topic, I've been thinking about what to do on the smaller machines to increase the amount of working storage. With a strict programming API I can use temp files as backing storage, kind of like implementing bank switched memory but backed by hard disk storage instead. Pretty slow, but better than not having any extra memory storage. One thing that frustrates me is that there is no way to make a 'bad' pointer on an 8088. Sure, the pointer can point to garbage, but there is no way to create a pointer that forces an interrupt. That would help things tremendously, especially when it comes to the part about testing and making the code robust. (It can be done with some extra hardware, but I don't think I'm that crazy yet.) Why the interested in memory allocation? I suspect that things like rsync are going to be limited by memory ... Also slightly related - Pasquale Villani. I am late to FreeDOS and reading the news of his passing reminds me of how much I owe to others in general ... -Mike -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] dos backups in the 21st century?
On 8/25/2011 6:20 PM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 1:48 PM, escapeesc...@front.ru wrote: If you use dos alone and purely on your machine, but nevertheless have some *nix server access you can use rsync client for dos: http://www.2net.co.uk/rsync.html Good, GPL. Interesting, works on 8086 (Borland C 3.1) w/ only 640 kb RAM. ;-) Rsync! Neat ... And probably easily ported to use mTCP instead, probably with a performance improvement .. Mike -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP 2011-07-29 (with HTGet)
The next mTCP is available, with HTGet now included: http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ There are two versions of the pre-compiled binaries to choose from - standard and -upx. The -upx version binaries are compressed with a program called UPX that decompresses the programs at load time. You will see that the binaries are much smaller in size, and it only takes a little more time to load the programs even on the slowest machines. (Bernd gave me the idea - thanks!) Mike -- Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] HTGet rewrite for mTCP
On 7/26/2011 12:09 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote: snip HTGET supporting common HTTP URL/URI syntax (http://server.domain.extension/path/file.ext) is good enough already. your -userpass seems to indicate no complete syntax is possible, and portnumbers either assumed 80 or not changeable. http://username:password@server.domain.extension:port/path/file?foo#bar The password option is nonstandard, but it makes the parsing of the URL easier. I need to add two things to the documentation: - nonstandard port numbers are supported using the expected syntax. - an HTTP proxy can be used if the HTTP_PROXY variable is set. I've not tested it though. Mike -- Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] HTGet rewrite for mTCP
I have an early version of HTGet ready that I would like to get some more testing on before it becomes part of mTCP. It is available here: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/htget.zip HTGet lets you download a file (or whatever content) from an HTTP server. Just put the URL on the command line. Some examples: htget http://www.google.com/ htget -v -o htget.zip http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/htget.zip htget -headers http://www.nytimes.com/ The first example grabs the Google search page and writes it to stdout. The second example grabs htget.zip and writes it to htget.zip, showing extra status messages. The third example shows you the headers from the NY Times main page. HTTP 1.1 and BASIC authentication are supported. Email me at mbbrut...@gmail.com with questions that are not of general interest to the list. Regards, Mike -- Storage Efficiency Calculator This modeling tool is based on patent-pending intellectual property that has been used successfully in hundreds of IBM storage optimization engage- ments, worldwide. Store less, Store more with what you own, Move data to the right place. Try It Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51427378/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] HTGet rewrite for mTCP
On 7/25/2011 6:52 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote: Thanks for creating this. It means you're pretty close to a basic WGET, and also reminds me why I never liked HTGET: no support for FTP and REDIRECT/MOVED. URL parsing seems fine. Not sure if/how HTGET would respond to HTTPS:// Example URL (responding with 403 / Moved): htget -o c:\fdbootcd.iso http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1-test2/fd11tst2.iso still HTGET will have its uses, just need to find specific files first :) Bernd In this particular example HTGet returns the following: Server return code: 301 Moved Permanently New location: ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1-test2/fd11tst2.iso HTGet parsed the headers correctly and even told you where to get the new content. But the new location is FTP only. I would call that an error on the part of the admin who moved it. ;-0 There is a nice, scriptable FTP client though ... HTTPS is not supported in this version. I'd need to get an encryption library that runs well on an 8088 and does all of the key/certificate negotiation. Mike -- Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention Research study explores the data loss prevention market. Includes in-depth analysis on the changes within the DLP market, and the criteria used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these DLP solutions. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51385063/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] HTGet rewrite for mTCP
On 7/25/2011 7:46 PM, Mike Eriksen wrote: Maybe a stupid idea, but couldn't HTGet just call you FTP client in case of a FTP-URL and let that one handle the download and keep the rest inside HTGet? Mike There is no simple call ... the FTP client is a stand-alone program. In the event of a 301 Moved Permanently HTTP response one could parse the new URI, figure out it is FTP, and build a script to use with the FTP client. The scripting support in the FTP client is minimal at the moment and there is no support for driving the script using a programming language of any type, so errors would be impossible to detect and recover from. FTP is also inherently more complex - you have active and passive mode to deal with, multiple sockets at the same time, user firewall problems, etc. One could repackage the FTP client code as a callable/linkable library that provides a simple FTP get or put type function. That would make it easier to integrate into something htget. It would also make htget far bigger too ... One could also expand the scripting capability of the standalone FTP client so that external scripts that could react to error conditions could be developed. That would make it easier for the htget program to use the existing client and control it in an intelligent manner. I think both approaches have merit - one provides building blocks that can be incorporated into other programs. The other enhances the ability of the existing client to run in an automated way. On a philosophical note, HTGet was purpose built to talk to HTTP servers. Most people start with a known good URL, so a 301 is unusual. And a 301 that redirects to an entirely different protocol is even more unusual. Coding for the worst case scenario makes the code bigger, buggier, and slower for the 95% of the time when the error is not going to be encountered ... for the 5% of time when something like this happens, some form of human interaction to switch to the FTP client or fix the server is not totally unwarranted. On a side note, a custom built updater for FreeDOS using HTTP would be interesting. (HTTP is far easier to work with because the responses are parseable and there is only one socket to deal with, which is always outgoing from the client point of view.) And there is always wget, which is quite a bit more versatile but bigger ... Mike -- Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention Research study explores the data loss prevention market. Includes in-depth analysis on the changes within the DLP market, and the criteria used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these DLP solutions. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51385063/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Timezones
On 6/22/2011 10:49 PM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros wrote: Hi Mike, I shouldn't even have called this thing a bug. It is, at most, an issue of semantics. Because the SNTC screen message used the word timezone, I thought it would write UTC+3. I'm probably right on that point (just ckecked it in the Wikipedia), but it was rather diselegant from me to find fault in such a fine set of programs. I apologize. Marcos :-) I don't think there is anything to apologize for. Like I said, the program is blindly using whatever the Open Watcom library provides. It probably needs to be made less ambiguous in the program output - the full timezone and offset should be shown. Regards, Mike -- Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Thanks
On 6/22/2011 8:10 PM, Mike Eriksen wrote: If SNTP works anyway like in Linux/UNIX then the computer takes its hardware clock as UTC. If the hardware clock is offset to local time it will be misinterpreted. The poor computer doesn't have any conception of UTC by itself, it only knows its hardware clock. UNIX computers always runs UTC in hardware no matter where on earth they are placed. DOS machines use local time. The timezone is required for this program so that it can take a timestamp provided in Coordinated Universal Time and translate it to the local timezone, whatever that might be. Mike -- Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Thanks
On 6/22/2011 9:15 AM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros wrote: Hi Mike, Thanks for mTCP! I experimented with it yesterday for the first time, and it took me just 15 minutes to get started, in spite of my near complete lack of internet experience (except of course web browsers and email clients). This also means that your manuals are well written, so my compliments for that too. Because I am now obsessed with idling the CPU by means of FD-APM, I tried your FTP with the DPAKBD program. It worked well, and CPU idle time was above 90%. And, last but not least ... the bug report! This is about SNTP. My Time Zone variable is set to UTC+3 (Brazil). The program did correctly set my clock to 3 hours behind Universal Time Coordinated, but on-screen it said UTC instead of UTC+3: --- mTCP SNTP Client by M Brutman (mbbrut...@yahoo.com) (C)opyright 2009-2011 Version: May 30 2011 Resolving pool.ntp.org, press [ESC] to abort. NTP server ip address is: 187.49.33.15, resolved in 0.00 seconds Your selected timezone is: UTC Current system time is: 2011-06-22 10:09:54 (etc.) --- Regards, Marcos Marcos, I am glad that you found the documentation usable - I spend a lot of time on the documentation, so it is good to know that it is time well spent. SNTP uses Open Watcom to do the time zone calculations. According to the Open Watcom documentation, the TZ environment variable follows this format: std_offset_dst_offset_,_rule (underscores are added for readability) Std and dst are time zone designations. The +3 that you are adding is an offset. So when Open Watcom parses the environment variable is sets your time zone as UTC and the offset as +3 hours from coordinated universal time. Timezone is what SNTP is printing out. I think this is a matter of working as designed. I might add some more output to make it more clear, but it probably is not a bug. (If you use the verbose flag on the program it will tell you the timezone offset in seconds explicitly.) Regards, Mike -- Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Licensing issues
On 6/2/2011 1:42 AM, Willi Wasser wrote: Some developers may not be too happy about the license choice, especially those who would like to grab your code and try to make money from it by making it part of an unfree software. Let's be serious! Is there still a market for any kind of DOS out there? Does it have any commercial value out there? Can you still make such an amount of money with it, that it's worth to struggle about licensing issues? For me it's a hobby. A little bit like those poeple who still operate steam railways nowadays. And it may be an attempt to show the world how else computers could be and that there is a difference between technical progress and the latest fashion. Many of my programs are such that i should have written them fifteen years ago but i didn't back then due to various reasons. I am really not afraid that someone else could get rich with my software, my experience is rather that nobody really cares. So what? I've had some commercial inquiries into mTCP in the last two years. DOS is out there and there are people still supporting it. Obviously not in large corporations, but it is out there. Networking is particularly interesting now with broadband connections being more widespread. Why use modems and dialup when you can transfer data much faster and more reliably with FTP? I'm seeing a small movement toward people FTPing data from store locations to a central location instead of using modems. Like you, for me it is a hobby ... hobbyists are my first priority. Mike -- Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Discover what all the cheering's about. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-dev2dev2 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Basic networking abilities
On 6/1/2011 5:30 PM, Ulrich Hansen wrote: Actually this is not really news but just a wish from my side. The discussion what*s part of FreeDOS 1.1 takes place since some time at freedos-devel. I think the developers decide, while we users should publish our expectations and wishes. So I really hope with the release of mTCP as Free Software, mTCP will become part of FreeDOS 1.1 as it has been already discussed in freedos-devel. I have only joined the freedos-devel list recently, so I have not seen any of the discussion. (I still consider myself a user primarily.) I think the bigger question is, what does DOS Networking really mean. In its current state there really is no such thing as DOS networking: - Most DOS networking applications do no integrate into DOS in any meaningful way. The exception would be programs that provide network file system access via drive letter. - Because most DOS networking programs are stand-alone applications, there is a great variety of applications. You have everything from tiny SNTP clients to Minuet and Arachne. You have several choice of TCP/IP stacks to build on. - The packet driver interface is a reasonably good standard for communicating with Ethernet cards. But there are other standards out there too. - A TSR that provides networking capability seems to be the natural way to extend DOS. But that approach has drawbacks. It is hard to fit what everybody needs in a single TSR. DOS networking is horribly fragmented because DOS is really network agnostic. The current approach seems to be to provide a variety of programs and let the user decide. Is something else planned? Mike -- Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] mTCP source code released
On 5/28/2011 3:57 AM, Bernd Blaauw wrote: hi Michael, congratulations on possibly having the first GPL3 DOS program ^^ I seem to recall you needing permission from your employer to do this so thanks go out to them as well. I think that honor was claimed already. I solved the permission problem by changing employers. ;-0 Hopefully this will make people come up faster with crazy stuff like: * a WGET (and/or CURL) program based on your TCP/IP stack * an email client * a twitter client * support for Wattcp.cfg from your DHCP program, or some batchmode which would mean returning parameters rather than writing to mtcp.cfg As you've got a 2011 TCP/IP stack, I guess IP6 support is next? :) I can see a simple version of WGET - I promised it to somebody almost a year ago. I had taken a look at the existing WGET and it was a lot of code - too much to fit into a 16 bit program. But a stripped down version is very possible. I have not thought too much about email. I can already send email using netcat and a text file with the email contents in it. That is good for sending notifications from a DOS system. Reading and storing email without corrupting anything is a much more difficult problem. Dave Dunfield already has a DHCP client that can write the configuration files in either mTCP or WATTCP format. Check out his collection of DOS networking utilities over at http://www.dunfield.com/doswid/index.htm . His version does not include my extensive tracing support, so I am hesitant to drop my version. (The tracing used to be important for debugging my code - now I use it almost exclusively debug other people's networks.) Adding WATTCP support to my DHCP would be fine as well - they are so close it makes sense. Better round trip timing (RTT) estimates for TCP packets and improved retransmit code based on those times is next on my TODO list. IPv6 should not be difficult but I think I have a few years before most people are needing that. even without all of the above, thanks for releasing your work. Hopefully it will inspire people. I realized that after the base library was done and applications were needed that I had become the bottleneck. In the middle of 2008 there was IRCjr, DHCP, and Netcat. In the last two years I have done FTP, Telnet, SNTP, PING, the FTP server and a lot of functional and performance changes to the base library. I can't keep up the pace ... If we are going to continue to spread the joy of DOS networking I am going to need help. I am kind of pleased that I just gave away 30,000 lines of reasonably good code. The hard part now is transitioning to become a project maintainer. Up until this point I basically did what I wanted to, at my schedule. I am going to have to find a way to give up some of that absolutely control, otherwise this will go nowhere. Will you add the binary distribution to the same website or prefer to keep that to your own site? That is some of the administrative work that I still need to get done. I am also trying to decide if the time is right to start using SVN or if I should defer that until I see how many changes are actually going to go in. SVN is nice from a legal standpoint because it shows who changed what and when, so I think it will be coming sooner rather than later. I've still gotta experiment to see if larger MTU sizes make that much of a difference, but detest writing FTP scripts for each download :) I use the larger MTU sizes almost exclusively, and yes, it made a big difference. You have that much less packet processing overhead to deal with and fewer interrupts to process. MTU 576 should be safe on nearly any network except those based on slower serial links; those often use smaller MTUs. With my ISP and the way things are setup in the US I never see fragments in the real world. I had to go through great lengths on my internal network to test the fragment handling code and it is still probably not well enough tested. FTP is a little flawed for testing performance because you are including the speed of the disk subsystem too. So for testing absolute raw TCP/IP sockets performance take a look at the SPDTEST utility in the distribution. For real world performance use FTP, but note that the disk has a significant impact. For comparison testing of MTU sizes it will be fine. Mike -- vRanger cuts backup time in half-while increasing security. With the market-leading solution for virtual backup and recovery, you get blazing-fast, flexible, and affordable data protection. Download your free trial now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP source code released
I released mTCP as open source today: http://code.google.com/p/mtcp/ Enjoy! Mike -- vRanger cuts backup time in half-while increasing security. With the market-leading solution for virtual backup and recovery, you get blazing-fast, flexible, and affordable data protection. Download your free trial now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-d2dcopy1 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] mTCP 2011-05-20 Version
Come and get it! http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ In this version: - CTCP support in IRCjr (you can do /me now!) - DHCP client enhanced to do multiple retries and give better error messages - Fixed a parsing error in the FTP server - Telnet can now work with servers that do not accurately interpret TELNET newlines - Miscellaneous improvements in all of the applications Enjoy! Mike -- What Every C/C++ and Fortran developer Should Know! Read this article and learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help Windows* and Linux* C/C++ and Fortran developers boost performance applications - including clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Large drives with 4k sectors presenting as 512b?
On 4/10/2011 11:35 PM, Jack wrote: Also, I do not know you and you do not know me, so WHO ARE YOU to assume I am irritated or in a bad mood?!! Are you in fact a COMMUNIST?? I seem to recall THEY used to operate via trying to beat-DOWN opposition with such unqualified INSULTS as you have thrown at me!! So are we now to think of you that way?? Learn to address THE POINT of a thread, boy, and keep your damn personal INSULTS OUT of it!! My point in the thread is that YOU do not get to choose what is the appropriate rate of progress. Either stock up on spare parts, or move along. Disparaging everybody in the industry who has a different point of view is ranting. The second point that you fail to grasp is that it costs too much money to maintain backwards compatibility with outdated standards past a certain point. No factory is going to stay open churning out 56K modems, CRT monitors, ISA cards, and in this case 512 byte sector hard drives past a certain point. You can have your choice only if you are willing to pay out the nose to custom fabricate your own hardware for old standards! I never advocated burning cycles for sake of burning them. My point there is that if we're looking for function, the hardware will and the additional cost of software overhead to keep backwards compatibility will probably do what we need. Once again, it's not our choice - if/when 512 byte sectors go away we're going to have to insert extra software for compatibility purposes. Jack, I'll just ignore you from this point on .. you just seem to be very angry. The readers of the list can judge for themselves. Mike -- Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Large drives with 4k sectors presenting as 512b?
On 4/10/2011 5:20 AM, escape wrote: Vote with your wallet. I'm personally not buying any 4k drives nor for myself nor for companies I'm working for. When you need more than 2Tb of space you always can add another 2Tb drive instead of replacing old drive with bigger (3Tb) one. I think that is a short term solution. Eventually all new drives are going to have 4KB sectors because it is easier to ship a standard product. 5 to 10 years down the road 512 byte sectors will be a legacy OS issue. Look at vintage computers as an example. I use DOS because that's what my favorite, vintage machines support. But finding old MFM hard drives that still work is getting harder and harder as the years go on. Eventually people decided it was time to find a more modern alternative, and we wound up designing and creating an 8 bit IDE card that can use LBA addressing. That lets us put the larger (newer) IDE drives in systems that were never designed for it. In a few years we're going to have to think about alternatives as the IDE drives die out. FreeDOS will have to do the same. Or you'll be stuck with antique hardware, or running in a virtual environment instead. (Which isn't all that bad.) Performance isn't much of an issue - if you really need the latest and greatest in performance, you are probably not running single threaded DOS apps. :-) Mike -- Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Large drives with 4k sectors presenting as 512b?
On 4/10/2011 12:08 PM, escape wrote: Please get it right. I'm not arguing against support of new technologies. But now it's often when manufacturers trying to disguise cost cutting and marketing rubbish as prominent new technology. Look at monitors as an example. Getting 16:10 aspect along with 4:3 was not a bad idea. While for some tasks 4:3 was better, 16:10 was better for others. But now 4:3 almost completely disappeared and 16:10 are quietly supplanted by 16:9. And with 16:9 aspect you plainly get less resolution (and thus less information displayed) for given diagonal and money compared to 16:10. Hey! They intended for watching movies! But was Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon shot in 16:9? If not count for tons of potentially broken legacy software, 4k sector is not a bad idea alone. But it became actual just now because manufacturers lacks other real technologies for holding more user data on same size platters. And 5 to 10 years down the road not only 512 byte sectors, but whole idea of precision mechanics that spins and wiggles to remember something may look slightly outdated. In fact it is already looking so about few years, but for the moment we (of course manufacturers at the first place), don't have any better solution than to increase sector size. I don't think I misread you. But the market is geared to the current problems, not the past problems. For some strange reason people like widescreen monitors even though most of our reading would benefit from portrait monitors. The current problem in the hard drive industry is that 4KB sectors are more efficient for data storage because of the nature of error correcting codes. The answer to broken legacy software will be more software that emulates what we need, or directly supports the newer hardware available. We either get frozen in time, or adapt. (For my vintage machines I stockpile a lot of parts that can't be made again, and where I can I adapt.) Mike -- Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
