Dude that is freaking amazing! I too had thought about something like that, but I had given up with my ‘stop gap’ effort of multinode running on OS/2 once I realized I only had multiple users a hand full of times and that even 4 nodes was overkill, but damn if that setup you have going is awesome!

I’m not sure if EtherDFS supports record locking, you may be in for some trouble when it comes to shared databases and doors.. Hopefully it all works though!

Let me know when you go live, I’ll be more than happy to feature it, especially with details on your config for spawning nodes, and haproxy.

I’ve got EtherDFS running in a dedicated QEMU/KVM instance, sharing a 24GB disk image with 16 more QEMU/KVM instances running PC-DOS 7, and MysticBBS 1.07. I still can’t run Mystic from the network share, but have been able to run the EXE from each VM’s C: drive, using the network share for all the shared data volumes.

On the frontend side, I’m running RLFOSSIL on each of the VMs, and HAProxy on yet another instance that also serves up fTelnet for users to connect with.
This makes it easy to have a multi-node setup that is transparent to users (one IP to connect to, HAProxy takes care of connecting users to an unused node, and spreads the load around to all the nodes in a round-robin fashion).

I’ve even gone to the point of making a VNC concentrator that shows all 16 nodes on one screen for easy monitoring.
https://i.imgur.com/dqGDPE2.png

The posts here have inspired and informed me to make creating my own multinode BBS a reality. And the recent EtherDFS post is responsible not only for making the multinode networking a reality, but also the EtherDFS sources provided a quick springboard for making a utility that automatically sets the wattcp IP & Mystic NodeID for each of my nodes based on the ethernet MAC address as part of the boot sequence. This has made it very easy to bring up new nodes quickly, and made it possible to scale to 250 nodes very quickly if demand ever called for it.

I look forward to setting up my BBS fully in the coming months, and making it public – something I had previously given up on just a few months ago.

Thank you!

If NW Lite runs under dosbox (have no information)

Because: SLIP xor PPP+packet drivers are supported and packet driver – odi shim exists

TL;DR try it in order to get experienced, serious serial networking howto is on dosbox wiki

Interesting, thanks! I think the article I was reading showed LANtastic had higher memory usage than Netware Lite though, so I’d be inclined to try Netware Lite on DOS as the client and Mars-NWE (Netware Emulator) on a Linux VM as the server, since I used both of those before and it will be a trip down memory lane. I gather from searching the web that Mars-NWE doesn’t work properly on 64-bit hosts, and I imagine it might be hard to get working on a recent Linux distribution, hence the VM. I may run it on Red Hat Linux 6 for nostalgia too!

Lantastic uses a custom version of NetBEUI as protocol. In theory you could implement an usermode service in windows talking this custom version of NetBEUI and interface it with the network card using TUN/TAP for Windows. Then you could use Lantastic to connect to it using the minimal client without TCPIP for a less hungry memory communication.Probably something like this can also be done with EtherDFS.

But for the more mainstream retro options, maybe there are some more lightweight than Microsoft’s client? Perhaps there is a difference in memory requirements between MS LAN Manager client and the MS Workgroup Client for DOS? I was just reading a review of peer to peer LANs from 1993, it says Netware Lite only needs 13K for a client-only machine. LANtastic was their editor’s choice but I never tried that myself, and unlike MS and Netware solutions I have no idea if there is any Linux software that can talk that protocol.