Yet another ShareTheNet success story:
Having successfully installed STN on my home network this past week,
I wanted to share my experiences and results with the list so that
others could benefit. Because I spent a lot of time trying to find
out if my hardware would work, I wanted to let people know that I had
success with the hardware listed in the subject line.
My configuration:
STN Box: Generic Pentium 120, 24 MB
Boca LANCard 100
Boca Internal 56K fax/modem
Dial-up PPP connection with dynamic IP assignment
Internal Network: Several PCs running Win95 or Win98,
plus one dual-boot notebook running
Linux or Win98. The PC's all contain
10/100baseT NIC's, while the notebook
contains a 10baseT PCCard NIC. They're
all connected via Cat 5 cable to a
10/100baseT hub.
The setup looks like:
+-----+
| | +-----+
| PC |------| |
| | | |
+-----+ | |
. | | +-----+
. | |----| STN |--- ppp dialup ----- ISP --- the world
. | hub | | BOX |
+-----+ | | +-----+
| | | |
| PC |------| |
| | | |
+-----+ | |
+-----+
Configuration Notes:
- The Boca LANCard 100 is, I believe, the same thing as
the Lite-On LF574. In any case, it contains (as of
this writing) the PNIC 82c169. The Boca part number
is BEN500IT. This card is supported by the "tulip"
driver (Tulip/DEC 21x4 selection on the Internal Net tab).
- The Boca modem is part number M56IMS (no longer sold).
- The tulip driver supplied with the STN installation
seemed to work fine, but after reading some of the
tulip support archives I decided to use the latest
available version of the tulip driver (version 0.91g).
I downloaded the source and compiled it using the
compile commands at the end of the file (if you
use emacs to look at the file, "M-x compile" automatically
invokes these commands). As far as I know, this requires
a Linux box running the same kernel as was used to
build STN (2.0.36 as of this writing), although the
more Linux-savvy among us may know of other ways to
do this.
There are two ways to get the driver onto the STN disk:
1) Direct copy onto the disk. From a Linux box, put the
STN disk in the floppy drive, then do
mcopy tulip.o a:/modules
2) Place the driver into the STN distribution, then build a
new disk. You'll need a way to get the new tulip.o file
onto your Windows configuration machine; put it in the
modules directory in your STN configuration tree
(usually C:\Program Files\ShareTheNet). I suggest renaming
the old tulip.o rather than writing over it.
I actually used both methods. I used (1) until I was sure I
liked the new driver, then used (2) so I was sure I would always
get the new driver whenever I built a disk.
- The modem *must* be configured to use one of the "standard"
COM ports. These are:
port I/O address IRQ
---- ----------- ---
COM1 3f8 - 3ff 4
COM2 2f8 - 2ff 3
COM3 3e8 - 3ef 4
COM4 2e8 - 2ef 3
I believe this is because of assumptions Linux makes about COM
ports (although I'm sure the Linux-savvy will set me straight
if I'm wrong). In any case, you can blame DOS for the arrangement.
I originally had my internal modem set to use the COM4
I/O address but with IRQ 5; I had to change this to the
"standard" COM2 setting. I disabled the on-motherboard COM2
hardware from the BIOS to make IRQ 3 available, then
used the modem board's Windows setup utility to set
the modem up for COM2. I'm not sure if the Windows
step was absolutely necessary, but it seemed to do the
trick; looking at the documentation for the modem card
it seems as if I could have done the same thing by setting
some jumpers on the card.
- I set the "Init String" on the ISP Modem tab to "ATZ"; although
this isn't what Windows used for this modem, it seems to work
just fine. One of these days I may sit down and figure out
what Windows is doing to init the modem.
I do notice that Windows sends a series of lines to the modem
rather than a single line, but that STN has (appears to have?)
no facility for doing this.
- I use SSH to connect from home to work through their firewall;
this worked through STN exactly as if I was connected directly
to my ISP.
Related links:
Boca Research: http://www.bocaresearch.com/
http://www.bocaresearch.com/products/networking.html
Lite-On: http://www.ltnlcc.com.tw/Product/LF574.htm
Tulip Driver: http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/tulip.html
STN: http://www.ShareTheNet.com
STN Mail list: http://www.webserv.com/mailman/listinfo/sharethenet
SSH: http://www.datafellows.com
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