OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Networking

TCP/IP from MVDM DOS sessions

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SoundChaser:
Hello folks,

TL;DR - is there a recipe to have packet drivers in a MVDM session talk to a NIC's physical device driver?

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If I got it correctly, in order to reach the network MVDM forwards network requests (from interrupts) to the matching VDD (Virtual device driver) which in turns escalates the call to the PDD (Physical device driver) which allows for coexistance of multiple DOS sessions using different protocols on the same network card managed by OS/2 at the PDD level. Great.

Fast forward in 2025, I mostly only care about TCP/IP. While my previous searches led me to find some development material for "IBM TCP/IP for OS/2" (the vanilla TCP/IP support) there's really only very few applications designed around IBM's SDK beyond IBM's own tools or WinOS2 TCP/IP support.

About _every_ other TCPIP application out there was, instead, using the MIT/FTP software packet driver approach.

Months ago, I entertained the idea of porting mTCP for IBM TCP/IP but there's a fair amount of uncertainty to that project, which certainly could end up being a great article for hackaday.com or patreon. A little voice tells me, there must a simpler way, but we just collectively forgot about it?

Reading about FTP Software TCP/IP for OS/2 in InfoWorld archives, in order to make the software run, the reviewers had to use the ODINSUP, because their network adapter only came with Netware support.

See: https://books.google.com/books?id=WzgEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=fr&pg=PA86#v=onepage&q&f=false

Then we have this also very entertaining bit from Netware that ODINSUP has (of course) it's mirror in ODI2NDI.OS2 that's part of (wait for it... it hurts....) NTS/2 (LAPS)... which is probably MTPN now?

See: https://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/Solutions/10051720.html

Given that there exists packet driver shims for ODI and NDIS that lives in the DOS realm, these would typically forward any request to the PDD through the virtual device driver. With probably a fair amount of net.cfg fun, it seems - at least on paper - that we could use mTCP software from DOS sessions with the packet driver correctly configured with the right shim.

For now, I would only care about Intel ethernet as it would cover most Thinkpads (for those running OS/2 or ArcaOS on bare metal) and virtualisation solutions.

Has anyone ever been able to do that? Is there a flaw in my conception of how network works in DOS that would make this usage scenario unviable?

SoundChaser:
Adding another bit, which seems to do exactly what I want, but in IPX world

http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/freeipx.html

Martin Iturbide:
Hello SoundChaser.

Here it is something related that I tried without success:
https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,2961.0.html

My goal at that time was to run  MicroWeb DOS web browser under a DOS VDM, but I was not able to do it. It uses mTCP and some connection between mTCP and IBM TCP/IP for DOS was required. Even the author of mTCP was here on the forums (mbbrutman), but I was not at his technical level to keep going.

Regards

SoundChaser:
Yeah my experiment would consist in using FTP Software TCP/IP stack instead. It likely comes with a VDD for DOS since they support WinOS2 (I expect it to be similar to Trumpet)

That driver would be a packet driver, which would be mTCP compatible (maybe?)

Sean Casey:
Hi SoundChaser,

Should you ever get FTP Software's stack working on OS/2, please report back.    I use Paradox 4.5 for DOS w. SQL Link to Interbase which requires FTP Software's TCP/IP stack.  Would like to ditch DOS and move it to OS/2.

I once looked at using the DIS_PKT shim that works with an NDIS interface, but due to my limited skills, I didn't get very far.

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