Adding Drivers - Part 2

Making DOS network ready

When I described how to add the first set of useful drivers, I already indicated that networking is also possible on MS-DOS machines. Actually when you look at today's network configuration settings (at least until Windows 7), you can easily spot the similarities to the very first network implementations on Microsoft operating systems. During this exercise, we will make use of the CD-ROM driver that was installed in the first driver session. You will need the following ISO-image, which contains all the MS-DOS related networking content that was previously available directly from Microsoft.

Download link

Microsoft-LAN-DOS.iso

How to add networking to DOS

Save the ISO image above to a place on your machine where VirtualBox runs. Start the MS-DOS Virtualbox. Insert the ISO-file into the VirtualBox virtual CD-ROM drive. Examine what is on the ISO image. To do that, switch to the command prompt if DOSshell is running.

dir
dir x:\

This should show you which directories are on drive X: (assuming you put the CD-ROM drive as drive letter X).

As you can see, there are multiple directories on there. LANMAN contains Microsoft LAN Manager version 2.2c, MSCLIENT contains Microsoft LAN client. AMD contains the PCNET network card driver. The other directories can be ignored for now. I will show you how to install Microsoft LAN Manager.
Let's first check what is inside the LANMAN directory.

dir x:\lanman

We find 4 executables, all self-extracting ZIP-files that represent the content of the original setup disks.To turn these 4 executables into a usable LAN Manager setup structure, we will

1. create a temporary directory on drive C:
2. extract the setup disk files to this temporary directory (for this part, I have created a little helper file (prepare.bat)
3. then execute the setup

Here are commands for that

x:
cd \lanman
prepare
@REM the following few lines are optional
@REM I have added these commands into the prepare.bat script already
c:
cd \tmp\lminst

setup

Now all required files are extracted and we can start with the installation. To do so, we switch back to the first subdirectory (cd \tmp\lminst) and then execute the setup program. How this setup works, is described in a little Youtube video again.

As you can see at the end of this little video, the MS-DOS box can ping the Google name server on IP-address 8.8.8.8. The LAN Manager setup can enhanced a little bit further. The following optimizations can be done:

• remove the NetBeui protocol (this has been added initially to avoid an obscure error with "net start workstation")
• give the machine a real hostname
• add DNS support

This is shown in the next video.

 

Now we can ping "www.google.com" and we can use all the usual "net xxx" commands. With that we could in principle access the internet. However we are now a little bit short on conventional memory. But this will be solved in the next session.