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I converted 2 MS-Dos 6.22 machines to virtual machines. Both computers have software that communicates over NETBEUI and IPX (I came to that conclusion after inspecting autoexec.bat - It loads IPX stack).

I followed this Vmware Forums post and installed the DOS amd_pcnet driver, configured it, and bound it to the required protocols. Also i installed the ODI driver for IPX/SPX did the same steps as above for it.

It seems they have NetBEUI communication, but I cannot PING between them using IPXPING.exe. I used the network address 00:00:00:00 and the MAC of the second computer when pinging.

How can I absolutely make sure there is NetBEUI and IPX communication between the 2 VM's?

UPDATE 1: I found that c:\net\ has an .ini files with the name of other machines on the network. I assumed that the files store connection configuration, and found that the file actually has a parameter netcard=DRIVER_FILE and changed it to the correct driver.

UPDATE 2: I ran Wireshark on the VMNet0 and I see that both VM's use IPX, NETVIOS, SMB and other protocols. I will inspect the packets and try to find more clues.

UPDATE 3: From the packet inspection I can see that both machines have successfully communicated over NetBIOS, established a session and transferred files using SMB. I think that is a solid indicator that NetBIOS is not the issue.

IPX, on the other side seems to have malformed packets. Both hosts broadcasted an announcement and both announcements were malformed.

A question: Is there a command to check connectivity over NetBIOS?

UPDATE 4: After much effort in both trying to solve the problem and trying to find an MS-DOS expert the client decided to discontinue the project.

masegaloeh
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Dean
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    Mother of god... – Ryan Ries Jun 18 '13 at 15:50
  • My thought exactly Ryan... I think this technology was around before I got my first PC. – Dean Jun 18 '13 at 15:52
  • Wh...wh...What's MS-DOS, and why is it still in production? – Jacob Jun 18 '13 at 15:53
  • Ancient phone system perhaps? – Nathan C Jun 18 '13 at 15:54
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    Legacy software that controls equipment. They asked me to come up with a solution to preserve the dinosaur. With no hardware available, I thought to virtualize it. – Dean Jun 18 '13 at 15:55
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    Godspeed Good Sir. – Jacob Jun 18 '13 at 15:59
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    Unfortuntately, keeping dinosaurs alive with whatever method possible is often the only way when physical equipment is connected. Sometimes, replacements are prohibitively expensive, sometimes they are impossible as there is nothing on the market. I always thought this was much more fun then just herding the newest machines. – Sven Jun 18 '13 at 16:00
  • They are configured to the same port group on the same vSwitch, right? – SpacemanSpiff Jun 18 '13 at 16:01
  • @SpacemanSpiff: I am running it in workstation, both on the same VMNet0 – Dean Jun 18 '13 at 16:03
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    You can have a look at the traffic on the hypervisor interface with `tcpdump` or the like. – Hauke Laging Jun 18 '13 at 16:04
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    If the source physical machines are still running then I would recommend an audit and a network capture to verify what communication protocols they're actually using. Troubleshooting IPX/SPX and NetBEUI based on the fact that they're being loaded from Autoexec.bat might be sending you on a wild goose chase. – joeqwerty Jun 18 '13 at 16:11
  • Let me guess - the equipment only has RG-58 connections, too? That would be just perfect. – squillman Jun 18 '13 at 16:52
  • re: netbios connectivity - have you tried nbtping? – booyaa Jun 25 '13 at 22:09
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    I'll have to poke at my Virtualbox VMs later. I have two independent MS-DOS 7 VMs that each can use different IPX stacks (MS Client, VLM, IPXODI) so I could try playing some old IPX LAN games. I've gotten the VMs to successfully communicate w/ a virtualized NW65 server, NW312 server, and NW410 server, as well as talking to each other. The IPX stacks are a bit different. VLM only works to talk w/ the NW VMs, IPXODI works for MechWarrior 2, and MS Client works for Masters of Orion 2. Did not try NetBIOS stuff, but that should be trivial once you know IPX is working right. – Kumba Jul 18 '13 at 06:28
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    PS, never got IPXPING to work right. I think the socket number "ping" (I think an IPX DIAG packet) for it isn't understood by the MS-DOS VLMs. The VLM stack gives you the best IPX support, but it gobbles up lots of conventional memory in DOS unless tuned properly and with some exotic memory managers thrown on top. – Kumba Jul 18 '13 at 06:32
  • @Kumba are you VM's available? – Janus Troelsen Dec 24 '14 at 23:30
  • I have them as VBox VDI's, but I've run quite a few experiments in them and haven't done any degree of sanitizing, nor have any idea where I could upload them. And since they run on top of MS-DOS 7.0 (yes, the Win95 DOS), I don't think I can legally distribute them anyways. That said, not *too* difficult to get things up and running. You'll spend more time fussing about with DOS' memory management than you will getting NW 3.x or 4.x running. – Kumba Apr 04 '16 at 01:04

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I would try out Dosbox. It has ipx support and with a few commands you can activate it. In fact simple gamers are the target audience. Dosbox tunnels ipx in UDP packets.

cstamas
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  • Both VM's are used to run software that controls equipment, i have no idea how to configure it to work on new machine. – Dean Jun 18 '13 at 17:58
  • Use Oracle's VirtualBox. It runs the older NetWare versions pretty well. Problems can arise at random on the newer NW, especially with SMP enabled (per the Vbox devs, NW does some weird things with SMP that they haven't figured out how to handle yet). I've managed to set up (for experimental fun) an IPX-to-IP gateway and successfully used NetScape 4.78 on a Win 3.11 VM that only has IPX support to connect to Google by tunneling IP/TCP inside of IPX. Google was obviously a bit confused at that User-Agent string. – Kumba Apr 04 '16 at 01:07