Upcoming code: virtual network hard drives for DOS

[Michael Brutman]

This is a preview of a project I'm working on; I just got some key parts of it working a few days ago so the excitement hasn't worn off yet.

The project is a device driver for DOS that looks like a hard drive, but the data is hosted on a server elsewhere.  The key features are:

• Works on DOS 2.1 and up.
• Large hard drive support (FAT16) if your version of DOS supports it.
• Minimal DOS RAM usage; about 5KB for the device driver plus whatever your packet driver requires.
• Uses IP and UDP so it is routable across the internet.  This allows you to connect to remote hard drives hosted by other people.  (Think of it that as an alternative to FTP.)
• The server side runs on Windows or Linux and does not require special packages or permissions.

The closest existing project to this would be iSCSI.  ATA over Ethernet would be a close second, but that's not routable outside of a network.  Unlike SMB or NFS this is at the block device level, making it filesystem agnostic.

The basics (reads and writes to a virtual 20MB hard drive) have been tested on a 128K PCjr running DOS 2.1 and on a virtual machine running DOS 6.2.  There is still a lot of work to do but the proof-of-concept works so the rest is just a simple matter of programming. ;-0

Here is the demo video if you are interested - just 5 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMd2NTow1oE

-Mike

[MrBuzzy]

Hi first time poster, this is really really really cool Mike. Keep it up, happy to test for you.

I’ve been messing around with having a single floppy that can pull down programs on demand just using batch files and mtcp.

Obviously being able to mount a full virtual C or D drive from the internet would be awesome.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mTCP" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mtcp+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mtcp/87e64ff6-4815-461b-8617-114d0ca8ad50n%40googlegroups.com.

[Tim Radde]

Sounds very interesting.  I'd be willing to test when you get to that point.  I have FreeDOS running on my Gateway 2000.  Or is this strictly for DOS?

[Michael Brutman]

It mostly works under the current FreeDOS (1.3).

In the video you see it giving the familiar "Abort, Retry Ignore" error on the drive when there is no drive connected.  I've since replaced that with a tiny read-only RAM disk that has one file with text in it that tells you there is no network drive connected.  I figured that was nicer than just an error message, but the RAM disk uses 64 byte sector sizes and it doesn't look like FreeDOS is happy with that.  You still see the RAM disk and the label ("NOTATTACHED"), but not the file.

The part that matters (connecting to remote disk images) works perfectly.