Realtek 8168 on FreeDOS

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Bill Allen

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Feb 28, 2025, 6:28:52 PMFeb 28
to mTCP
Greetings everyone! It may be that I have undertaken a futile endeavor, but I have been trying to get a Zimaboard with dual Realtek 8168 NICs working on FreeDOS. I must say that for an ancient IT guy, this has been a blast from the past having to go back to the days of loading up ODI packet drivers. However, I am just about to give up. I load up in the following sequence and this much at least works, or seems to.

LSL
RTGHODI.COM (asks me to select which of the two cards it finds, to I tell it the one the network cable is plugged into, NIC 1)

No errors at this point and it seems I have successfully loaded the packet driver into memory. The load up seemed happy enough with the settings in the NET.CFG.
(It took a lot of work to get all the files and information together to get this far! LOL)

After that, I try for DHCP.EXE from the mTCP distribution and get the following:
Init: could not set up packet driver
Could not initialize TCP/IP stack
And then a message from FDNET.BAT (I think) that the Network is unreachable/unavailable, obviously as a result of the TCP/IP stack not being initialized.

Am I pursuing an exercise in futility trying to get DOS networking going with what I presume to be very modern NICs? If so, not a huge loss but I feel like I am so very close.

By the way, I am running FreeDOS 1.4-r2 with the very recent mTCP that is included. Everything networking with mTCP does work perfect with the same in a Virtualbox setup.

If y'all have read this far, thanks very much for your time!

Best Regards,
Bill




Michael Brutman

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Feb 28, 2025, 9:48:48 PMFeb 28
to Bill Allen, mTCP
Hi Bill,

The error message from DHCP means that it could not find the packet driver.  Based on what you told ODIPKT.COM you should have the following line in your mTCP configuration file:

PACKETINT 0x60

Upper or lower case is fine, but the software interrupt is specified in hex in that format.  0x60 should be 96 decimal, which matches what you have.


-Mike


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Bill Allen

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Mar 1, 2025, 4:10:36 PMMar 1
to Michael Brutman, mTCP
Mike,

I finally got networking going. While I did have PACEKTINT 0x60 in my mTCP config file, I think the root of my problem was just too out of date ODI drivers for the current NIC that I have in the Zimaboard. However, I switched from the older ODI method to a bit newer NDIS method using files from MSCLENT 3.0 with success! I am using your January 2025 build of mTCP on FreeDOS1.4-r2. I have poured over your site and so appreciate the work you have done over the years to make mTCP available, thank you!

Here is my working configuration on a Zimaboar 832 with Realtek 8168 NIC. I will share this information on the FreeDOS Users forum as well so that perhaps others there may also benefit.
VOILA!!!

Best Regards,
Bill Allen

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