Author Topic: USB NICs  (Read 9703 times)

Meeko

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USB NICs
« on: February 26, 2015, 03:08:26 am »
Are any 10/100 USB NICs supported in OS/2 4.50 and able to work through VirtualBox's USB controller? I already have the base USB drivers (usbhcd197.zip). Would I need a USB networking driver in addition to the driver for the NIC?

Dave Yeo

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #1 on: February 26, 2015, 03:51:07 am »
According to x:\IBMCOM\macs\USBETHR.NIF, the only supported chip is the Kawasaki LSI KL5KUSB101 chip, vendor 3Com USB Network Interface (3C19250).
I can't remember anyone actually using the above and I don't think any work has been done since IBM released the driver.

Meeko

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #2 on: February 26, 2015, 04:15:08 pm »
Then it looks like one thing I wanted to do in OS/2 will not be possible  :(

Greggory Shaw

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #3 on: February 26, 2015, 05:44:52 pm »
Then it looks like one thing I wanted to do in OS/2 will not be possible  :(

Why not - they're on eBay for $10 bucks (NEW) free shipping ! If your going to be using OS/2 trust me eBay is going to be your new best friend:) - well not so much using a VM, Lol.  Any reason why you're not using vBox networking ?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/3COM-USB-NETWORK-INTERFACE-3C19250-/120488695518?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c0daf96de

Ever thought about writing something up for everyone, you're installing Warp 4 right ? Os2notes.net needs some more content - http://os2notes.net/os2virtualbox.html


Greggory
« Last Edit: February 26, 2015, 06:34:32 pm by Greggory Shaw »

Martin Iturbide

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #4 on: February 26, 2015, 06:43:42 pm »
Hi Erich

It will be interesting if you can explain a little bit of what you want to do.

I had tried on VirtualBox eCS VM guest (Windows host) with USB to test some USB webcam, USB mouse, USB flash drives and other USB devices connected on the host.  But I never thought on testing (and I don't have) a USB-Ethernet device, since on the virtual machine you can use the host's NIC to access the network.

Do you want to separate how the Guest eCS-OS/2 VM connects to the network from the host machine? Is there any specific reason to do that? Or it is only to test the device to be sure it can run on a stand alone eCS-OS2 real machine hardware?

Regards.
Martin Iturbide
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... just share the dream.

Meeko

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #5 on: February 26, 2015, 09:22:05 pm »
I want to try out a TCP/IP-based mesh network. It can use the Internet but does not have to. It requires a dedicated (and compatible) Linksys or Ubiquiti wireless router. I have a Linksys WRT54GL 1.1 and appropriate firmware. Using the mesh in the USA requires a FCC license which I do have.

One problem is the mesh is designed to use the 10.* IP space which is what my LAN uses. My intention was to unplug the VirtualBox NIC and connect the USB NIC when I want to use the mesh. With the USB NIC being the guest's only active NIC, it can use 10.* without the mesh and he LAN coming into contact with each other.

I have found the RAM allocation of all running guests must total no more than 1.5G or it will adversely affect the host's performance. I can use my XP32 guest (768M) and still have more than enough room for OS/2 (128M). Today's lightweight Linux distros need more than that. I couldn't find any good talker server options, so I was going to use TinyMUSH or PerlMUD. (If I did this in Linux I might use TinyMUX instead). I have to be careful in my choice and configuration of server because it is unlawful to use any encryption. MU* servers usually use plain telnet which would be ok.

But I am going to need driver support for this idea to work.

Meeko

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #6 on: February 26, 2015, 09:45:38 pm »

Ever thought about writing something up for everyone, you're installing Warp 4 right ? Os2notes.net needs some more content - http://os2notes.net/os2virtualbox.html

Greggory

There is already a good article at https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=63847

It talks about installing Fixpack 5 and only mentions 15 at the bottom. I don't think there's much point in installing 5 when it is just as easy (and still free) to install 15.

It also doesn't mention you need several more updates to be able to use the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

They also don't mention the initial 2G hard drive barrier. VirtualBox's support cleared that up for me. IBM1S506.ADD on the boot floppies has a 2G limit, so that is the most your C: can be. Perhaps that can be overcome by using the virtual SCSI controller instead of IDE. I replaced IBM1S506.ADD with Daniela's driver to overcome the limit. My C: is still 2G but D: and E: are 15G each. If you are going to use virtual SCSI, VirtualBox's support says you must choose BusLogic. I have CD drives on both virtual controllers.

VirtualBox's floppy support doesn't work with anything but 1.44M disks. Since you can't use XDF, Create Utility Diskettes is useless. I also tried dual floppies but B: would not work.

Dave Yeo

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #7 on: February 26, 2015, 10:12:25 pm »
Somewhere on Lenova's site are some updated floppy install disks, they're supposed to be for Thinkpads but work fine for most hardware. It's also trivial to update the ibms1506.add driver and add copyfromfloppies to the install disks config.sys though you have to know about that.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060926004818/www.warpupdates.mynetcologne.de/english/site_contents.html used to be the best site for updating and still gives ideas for what to Google.

ivan

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Re: USB NICs
« Reply #8 on: February 26, 2015, 11:03:51 pm »
Erich,

There is a way of not using the install floppies and getting an updated bootable cd at the same time.

For that you need a working OS/2 install and updcd http://xenia.sote.hu/~kadzsol/rexx/sajat/updcd.htm Download updcd and install it then add the fixes, updates and anything else you want on the list, let it run and build the updated bootable iso that can be used with virtualbox.

That is how we created our first master install disk which then changed over time to the dvd we now use which includes utilities and many of the base programs we use on our workstations.