Using the Internet (or an IP Network) from a MSDOS Machine

This discussion is directed to the Internet techie; if you are attempting to set up an MSDOS machine for use on the Internet and do not have the technical expertise, you may want to ask for a bit-head to help you. You should also get the information from TV Dog's DOS Internet Page - it will be very valuable.

For purposes of this discussion, we will assume that you have a connection to the Internet, and have a packet driver loaded. This packet driver could be a PPP connection, a SLIP connection, or an Ethernet connection - or whatever else you may have a packet driver for.

Having said that, this article is about using Internet tools on a MS-DOS machine. For this discussion, these are the specifications for this MSDOS machine:

This means that many products are ruled out, because they cannot run in this minimal of an environment. However, in one case, I have just such an environment: a Zenith laptop. All of the tools detailed here have run in this environment.

Why?

This started out mainly as an attempt to get my Zenith laptop with two 720k floppy drives onto a network. Having purchased a Xircom 10Base-2 Pocket Parallel Port Adapter last week, this attempt has kicked into high gear - and succeeded. I also tried to put my 386SX-16 on the network, but that machine is now nothing more than a motherboard as it got replaced by a 486DX-66 (about all anyone needs in my opinion - but that's another story).

Putting my laptop onto a network provides it with that much more usefulness, and also allows it to have much more "disk space" than otherwise would be possible.

TCP/IP Stacks and Their Configurations

There are basically two methods of configuring your network information. First is using environment variables to set all of the TCP/IP information; the other is to set an environment variable to point to the configuration file.

For this reason, one of the first things to do is to increase the space allowed for environment variables. To do this, use the SHELL command (found in your CONFIG.SYS file):

SHELL=A:\COMMAND.COM /E:1024 /P

WATTCP

WATTCP (or Waterloo TCP) is configured through the use of a configuration file (normally called WATTCP.CFG. Set the environment variable WATTCP with the complete pathname of the file, including filename, like so:

SET WATTCP=B:\WATTCP.CFG

Put this statement in a batch file.

Some of the data can be overridden by using environment variables; in some cases, this may be unavoidable (such as dynamic IP). These variables are some that may be set:

Many dialers will create a batch file to set these for you.

CUTCP

CUTCP (or Clarkson University TCP) is configured the same way as WATTCP; however, the environment variable used is CONFIGTEL, and the normal filename is CONFIG.TEL - like so:

SET CONFIGTEL=B:\CONFIG.TEL

Put this statement in a batch file.

Some of the data can be overridden by using environment variables; in some cases, this may be unavoidable (such as dynamic IP). These variables are some that may be set:

Many dialers will create a batch file to set these for you.

Trumpet

Trumpet is a TCP/IP stack distinct from the WATTCP stack; it was developed by the same people who created (and became famous for) the Trumpet Winsock for Windows. Trumpet relies on using environment variables to set every detail - of which there are not too many. These are some of the ones you may have to set:

Network Applications

Pine (Gopher, News, Mail)

Pine is a mail/news client which has been used on the UNIX scene in recent years. There are versions for several operating systems. Newer PC-based versions no longer support DOS or Win 3.11; however the creator recommends looking at older versions in general and at PC-Pine v3.91 (for use with packet drivers) in particular for DOS systems with 640K or less.

Arachne (FTP, Web, Telnet, Gopher, News, Mail)

Arachne is a nice browser for DOS, requiring only 640K and a CGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA monitor.

Minuet (FTP, Web, Telnet, Gopher, News, Mail)

Minuet is quite a fancy tool, and quite capable. The version I tried was labeled as v1.0 Beta 18. It is a comprehensive tool, including ping, telnet, FTP, WWW, news, and mail. It is very capable, and provides a nice interface.

However, it may require more space than 720k on disk; I have not yet tried to put it on a 720k disk.

Lynx (World Wide Web)

Lynx v2.8 for DOS 386+ or Win32 is a text-based WWW browser, and works very well.

Bobcat (World Wide Web)

Bobcat is a derivative of DOS-Lynx (a text-based WWW browser based on Lynx), and works very well. However, it swaps a lot, and this slows the application down - if you can put up with that, it makes a nice WWW browser.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

IRC is an IRC client (yes, named IRC). I have been unable to test it, however.

QVT_TCP (Telnet, FTP, lpr, lpd, ftpd)

QVT_TCP is a nice integrated tool, but seems somewhat bug-prone. It provides Telnet, FTP, and lpr services (including lpd).

CU-TCP (Telnet, FTP, lpr, lpd, ftpd)

CUTCP (or Clarkson University TCP) is a derivative of NCSA Telnet, and it is very nice and worth using. It is similar in some ways to QVT_TCP and provides the same functionality. However, there are very few bugs, if any - it seems much more stable.

XFS (Network File System)

XFS is probably the best unknown treasure I've found - a reliable NFS implementation - and freeware to boot. To me, this program seems simpler and better than Son of Stan's Server or the other shareware and demoware available.

Proxies: A Special Case

To my knowledge, there is no support in any of these configurations for proxy servers (or cache servers such as Squid, by definition). At home, I never have been able to use these applications to go through my cache server to the outside world. If you know otherwise, send me some email at ddouthitt@usa.net and let me know.

1