File transfer from dos 6 system

Question

On my new job we have an old dos machine running dos 6.22. This machine is necessary for data acquisition for scientific experiments. So it needs to continue to work as it is.

Since data transfer is a real pain I got the task to find a solution to transfer files from the dos machine to a Linux server, preferably automatic.

I'm an engineer and not a computer scientist, I know a few things but I've never had anything to do with dos.

I know that a few years ago the file transfer was done by scpdos, this eventually stopped working. With scpdos you can connect and it even asks for the remote password, but then "unsupported remote protocol" is shown.

Well, I have no idea and wanted to ask you for help.

Optimally I can run a script in the mail lunix server, that copies all files in a specific directory on the dos machine and deletes them afterwards. This every x min.

I've got a raspberry pi, wo may be the pi could act as coping device like: get data from dos, send to server, delete data on dos... Repeat

Hopefully you can help. Thanks.

Answer 1

DOS 6.22 was not designed to be used in a networked environment. Since those days, people have written all sorts of creative tools to make DOS speak on a network. The best way to copy files between Linux and DOS is going to be NFS, SSH or FTP.

NFS

There is a NFS client for DOS called XFS: http://omolini.steptail.com/mirror/winsite/winsite-mar96-3/info/pc/win3/winsock/xfs191.zip/index.html

The way this works is that you would set up an NFS export on the Linux side and then mount that NFS share with the XFS client in DOS as described here: http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/NFS

Then you could script actions on the DOS side to push files to the NFS server in Linux land.

FTP

If you need to work the other way around then you need an FTP server for DOS like this: https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_FTPSrv.html

Then you could make the FTP home directory point to the location of the files you need. That way you could script the collection of the files from the FTP server using the FTP client on the Linux side.

SSH\SCP

You could use SSH\SCP as well but I only see a client for DOS: http://sshdos.sourceforge.net/

This means you would have to make the batch script connect, and upload the results to the Linux SSH server.