Mail Archives: opendos/2001/03/10/11:35:32
Since this thread seems to have stirred some response (for which I am
grateful) I will pass on what we are doing for what it is worth.
We have licensed copies of Windows31 that came from the Government along
with a bunch of old machines. We install Drdos and windows31 on older
machines. It is much faster than Win95 on the same machines, and there
is a lot more sharware/freeware out there for DOS/Win31 than for Win9x.
DRDOS/OPENDOS as a platform for Win31 smokes compared to MSDOS, and of
course is free for our non-profit and school system clients. In
applications with users that won't get all choked up if they don't see
the MicroSoft logo, we put Arachne on the boxes instead of Win31; it
makes a more stable machine and is bulletproof in a school lab.
For Win31 over DRDOS, we use packet drivers, the winpkt shim for win31,
and trumpet as the tcp/ip stack. Works fine with modems also, with
trumpet running to the modem. Arachne has it's own stack, and requires
only a modem or a packet driver. NCSA telnet and ftp, irc chat, mp3
player, and all that good stuff are available as plugins for Arachne. In
our applications, we run a linux server on the backbone to provide
dhcp/bootp services so no one has to screw around with ip numbers.
Internet explorer 5.0 is available for Win31, as well as late versions
of Netscape, so we have up to date browser and email clients that aren't
a shock to the sensibilities of the MicrosSoft addicts. I don't as a
general rule use the networking that is included with DRDOS, since that
is ndis/ipx oriented and is a hog for resources. We do have a lab setup
in a grade school that we setup with DRDOS peer to peer so we could
share printers and disk space, and it works like a champ. We ran a ndis
shim on top of the ethernet driver that makes it look like a packet
driver, and that talks through winpkt to Win31/Trumpet, which gives use
TCP/IP access to our linux server which goes to the internet via
framerelay.
The combination of OPENDOS/DRDOS and Linux has opened the door for us in
terms of putting together good labs with Internet facilities using older
machines.
We have websites at http://cis.pcc.cccoes.edu, http://dcl.cccoes.edu,
and http://dcl.pcc.cccoes.edu that are located in our networking lab at
the college. There is a DRDOS/Win95/WinNT lab with 20 workstations
behind the cis server which is running slackware 7.1 with masquerading.
The dcl server is a nine-computer cluster running mosix over slackware
linux.
Any one interested in how we do all this stuff, email me. We have spent
a lot of time with it.
--
Tom Webb
Come visit at http://wordwonder.com
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