OS/2 - Windows file copy

[john...@nospam.com.au]

Since Warp Peer stopped recognising Win XP on my LAN, I have been copying files
using XP's NETBT recognition of Warp.

If I replace XP with Win7, will this still work?

[Marcel Mueller]

On 23.08.16 03.09, john...@nospam.com.au wrote:
> Since Warp Peer stopped recognising Win XP on my LAN, I have been copying files
> using XP's NETBT recognition of Warp.

? - never heard of "NETBT recognition".

> If I replace XP with Win7, will this still work?

Probably not. There are several issues regarding IBM Peer.

First of all it need (almost) unencrypted passwords, i.e. the LANMAN2
authentication. This is disabled by default in Windows (and also Linux).
There are registry patches to come around this, but I am unsure whether
they still work with Win7. There is an option in the local policies to
control this setting called "send unencrypted password to third-party
SMB servers". But I never get OS/2 to accept the Windows (weakly
encrypted) LM2 password, so you may be stuck with public guest access
without any security.

Secondly the browser protocol is different. The machines will not see
each other. However, you can still connect if you have the IP address
and, of course, the netbios name and workgroup name of the target. This
can get a bit complicated on the windows side because if you connect
with NET USE \\192.168.1.xxx\yyy windows does not know the netbios name
of the target. An entry in \SYSTEM32\DRIVER\LMHOSTS will fix this.

OS/2 can connect to secondary workgroups if you enter their name to
\IBMLAN\IBMLAN.INI at "OTHDOMAINS=". But I have no idea how to connect
to peers where the NETBIOS name is not seen from OS/2. The hack just to
enter the IP address at NET USE does not work for OS/2.


The easiest way to connect with OS/2 to modern network is to use Samba.
However, the file system driver for Samba networking is not free. It
requires a (newer) eCS or a Netdrive license. Maybe this does not apply
to the server part. So you still may set up a samba server for free.
However, you need to disable IBM Peer for this to work and so you loose
also the client capability to other OS/2 or Linux servers.


Another option is to use a common Linux server for data exchange. IBM
Peer is still able to connect to a Samba server if LANMAN2
authentication is allowed (two settings in smb.conf).
However, the other way around (cifs mount) is buggy in recent Samba
builds. Samba sends requests with higher protocol levels than negotiated
and OS/2 responds correctly "unknown function".


Marcel

[Marcel Mueller]

On 27.08.16 16.50, Dave wrote:

> Marcel Mueller wrote:
>>
>> Another option is to use a common Linux server for data exchange. IBM
>> Peer is still able to connect to a Samba server if LANMAN2
>> authentication is allowed (two settings in smb.conf).
>> However, the other way around (cifs mount) is buggy in recent Samba
>> builds. Samba sends requests with higher protocol levels than negotiated
>> and OS/2 responds correctly "unknown function".
>>

> I enabled NFS on my OS/2 VM, it will talk to Linux boxes that way.

Unfortunately the old nfs server of OS/2 is quite buggy too.

Files created on the OS/2 side often do not show up at Linux clients
until next unmount/mount.

File locks do not work or at least are not supported correctly by the
OS/2 server. This breaks several applications because they get an
unexpected I/O errors.

File metadata (probably the time stamps) are not preserved with the
required accuracy. This confuses tools that rely on that. Even simple
editors show up warnings that the files changes unexpectedly, preferably
immediately after save.

However, simple file copy from the Linux side works. But the first bug
can be annoying even there.


Marcel