Just a little FYI...
I've just spent a very nice sunday getting my amiga's networked. the otherhalf happily obliged to aid my peace and amiga based tranquility, by watching CSI and Dr Who re-runs off the sky+ box all day.
anyway, my idea was to dump all my amiga CD's onto my PC and share them out. also a networked share would allow me to backup my machines over the network, and a minimal workbench installation with tcp stack would let me do a full system restore.
As opposed to my current backup method using USB thub drives, cos only two of my miggys have USB.
anyway, i have found that all you need to mount a share from a PC is the following...
the smb-handler from the smbconnect package placed into your L: directory.
then select a dosdriver in your storage dos drivers, and right click "copy"
rename the copy to whatever you like, i use the name of the share i'm going to mount.
then fire up your favourite text editor to edit the file you've just created.
clear out all of the text that is in there. everything.
and then put in this.
/* PC network share */
Handler = L:SMB-Handler
stacksize = 40000
Priority = 10
Globvec = -1
Startup = "C=\\WindowsBox:192.168.0.200\amishare MH=A1200:192.168.0.103 W=WORKGROUP U=me P=numpty"
this mounts the share "amishare" from the PC "windowsbox", that has the ip address 192.168.0.200 on the Amiga with hostname "A1200" and ipaddress 192.168.0.103, with the Workgroup name "WORKGROUP", the user name "me", with the password of "numpty", to a device on the amiga called "C", which will show up on workbench as a drive called, "amishare on windowsbox"
obviously change the bits of it to reflect your setup
so as soon as you have the IP stack running, you just double click the device driver, and after a couple of moments of authenticating, a new icon appears on your workbench. btw, it seems that only OS3.9 correctly reports back the true device capacity of network shares that are on massive drives. ;-)
on the winXPpro PC acting as the server, i have both a wireless USB dongle, and onboard ethernet, running in a "bridged" configuration. the wire from the PC goes to a switch which my amiga's plug into, and the wireless hooks up to the router downstairs. this means the amigas can get across the bridge and talk to the internet via the router. also, the bridge is a Virtual Network card in its own right, so this can be set with a static IP address for ease of use.
each of the amigas has the router, the PC, and all other amigas in its host table. the PC on the otherhand, has had nothing updated.
my router is setup to dish out DHCP addresses from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.99. 100-199 is reserved for amigas, and 200-254 is for 'servers' :-)
anyway, this works for me. and you don't need to muck around with samba, tango, SMB-net, or SMB-connect (except for the SMB-Handler). :-)
tested with:-
A500, GVPA530, 3.1rom, bear-metal OS3.1 install, amigakit's easynet. 0.5MB chip 8.5MB fast, clockport adapter, subway USB, poseidon V4, d-link dub-e100 USB2LAN adapter on usbasixeth.device.
notes:-
for some reason, is unable to handle big (10MB+) transfers, as the device locks up and dumps data back to the PC at about 8MB/s. as the amiga can't handle that, or the USB controller can't even come close to dealing with that much info, it must be the d-link itself. further testing required.
A1200, 3.1roms, bear-metal OS3.1 install, amigakit's easynet.
2MB chip, amigakit branded pcmcia netgear MA401 Wifi card using prism2.device.
notes:-
not sure why, but the prism2 drivers for the wifi card work fine with easynet, using WEP encryption. however, using genesis, the card won't understand WEP, and security has to be disabled on the router to get a connection.
anyway, able to run workbench, easynet AmiTCP/IP stack, wificard with WEP running, and SMB network share in about 1.2MB of ram. maybe there is hope for my A600 yet...
occasional "connection closed by other side" error.
A1200, 3.1roms, bear metal OS3.1 install, amigakit's easynet. blizzIV030/scsi, 2MB chip, 16+128MB fast. Greycell 10Mb/s ne2000 pcmcia network card, using latest cnet.device.
notes:-
rare "connection closed by otherside", but otherwise fairly reliable and reasonably snappy. copy 800+kB DMS files across to/from PC in a couple of seconds or so.
A1200, 3.1roms, bear metal OS3.1 install - upgraded to OS3.9 BB2. setup with genesis off the OS3.9 disc. BlizzPPC040/scsi, 2MB chip, 64+128Mb fast. netgear FA411 100Mb pcmcia card using latest cnet16.device.
only had one connection timeout error the entire day it was on the network, and that was probably due to the race contention the A500's D-link was having with the PC.
able to run OS friendly apps over the network fairly happily.
hope this is of some use to some of you...? :-)
