Hey folks & fellow retro PC enthusiasts!

I managed to pickup a pretty mint compaq SLT/386 a couple of weeks ago with working monitor, keybaord, floppy and the original working hard drive (ok its a conner so :( but still... it works!)

Being a laptop there no expansion slots to put things into & of course it does not have network card. But as well all know, one of the first things one must absolutely do with a new retro PC is to find some way to get it on the Internet!

I managed to do this using the plip packet driver for dos & using the plip linux kernel module + some config to share Internet access via plip - if people are interested, I'll be happy to explain how I set it all up in more detail.

Anyhow it did take a while get this working as in the end I had to recompile the kernal with a modified config that had disabled support for IEE 1284 transfer modes in the "Parallel Support section" of the kernel config.

That made it all work. Without that, I just got lots of "plip0 timeout..." errors in the system logs on the linux server and no connectivity at the laptop end...

Anyone else played with plip to network an old PC with linux? did you run into this issue? Is there some way to make this work via kernal module option tweaks or some such???

Just asking as this seems like the sorta thing some of you would have tried, I wonder if any of you have run into the same issue?

... C:\ Virus check complete. All viruses functioning normally

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

Hey folks & fellow retro PC enthusiasts!

wassup! :D

I managed to pickup a pretty mint compaq SLT/386 a couple of weeks ago with working monitor, keybaord, floppy and the original working hard
drive (ok its a conner so :( but still... it works!)

nice! i recently got my toshiba t1200 back from repair and got it online with a parallell port to ethernet adapter from xircom

ki> Being a laptop
there no expansion slots to put things into & of course ki> it does not have network card. But as well all know, one of the first ki> things one must absolutely do with a new retro PC is to find some way to ki> get it on the Internet! ki>
your just like me! >:3

I managed to do this using the plip packet driver for dos & using the
plip linux kernel module + some config to share Internet access via plip
- if people are interested, I'll be happy to explain how I set it all up in more detail.

please tell me the details i am really curious how this works

Anyhow it did take a while get this working as in the end I had to recompile the kernal with a modified config that had disabled support
for IEE 1284 transfer modes in the "Parallel Support section" of the kernel config.

That made it all work. Without that, I just got lots of "plip0
timeout..." errors in the system logs on the linux server and no connectivity at the laptop end...

interesting
whats your contact?

Anyone else played with plip to network an old PC with linux? did you
run into this issue? Is there some way to make this work via kernal
module option tweaks or some such???

i never did because i been too busy zand i need help with this!:3

Just asking as this seems like the sorta thing some of you would have tried, I wonder if any of you have run into the same issue? nope i need i help too with setting it up

we also need a plip box to exist from parallell port to ethernet. we could really use one xD

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

please tell me the details i am really curious how this works

Will do, hope to get some time this weekend to write something up. I'll message you here when I get that done.

we also need a plip box to exist from parallell port to ethernet. we
could really use one xD

Yea we really could. There is plipbox for amiga, I wonder if that would also work with PC... hmmmmm.... I wonder if anyone has tried.

... Anything not nailed down is a cat toy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

- if people are interested, I'll be happy to explain how I set it all in more detail.

please tell me the details i am really curious how this works

OK here we go!

First thing you need a linux box with a parallel port & you need to disable IEEE 1284 transfer modes for the kernal parallel port driver.
The only way I found to do this was to recompile the kernel with it disabled.

If you configure you kernal with `make menuconfig`, you can find that config item under `Device Driver` then `Parallel Port Support`. Then disable `IEEE 1284 Transfer Modes`.

Recompile your kernel & modules, do what you have to get your distro to use it & reboot!


Next at the dos end, make sure you have the plip packet driver on you machines + MTCP. You will need the plip packet driver loaded and running on your dos machine AND have it connected to your linux machine with your parallel port laplink cable before you setup the link from the linux end, this tripped me up a bit at the start!

Now at the linux end I setup my hosts file to hold the IP address I use for my plip network:
192.168.2.1 linux
192.168.2.2 dos

change this to whatever you need, bearing in mind you have to use a link-local network! Also at the dos end, make sure to setup MTCP to use the correct IP & also to use your `linux` ip as the gateway. Also use a small network netmask like 255.255.255.254.

Cool now to setup your linux box as an internet gateway over plip!

I just created a bash script to do this, if you've setup your hosts file as per above, you should be able to use it with only minor tweaks. Replace `eth0` with whatever you linux's boxes real network adapter is called:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
rmmod lp
modprobe plip
ifconfig plip0 linux pointopoint dos arp up
echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -i plip0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o plip0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

Put ^^ in a .sh file, make it executable with `chmod +x` & run it. That should setup your linux box as a internet gateway! It worked just fine on my debian 13 box.

Just be sure to have plip loaded and runnong on you dos machine & the plip cable connect between the dos machine and linux machine first.

... Doublespace? It's been working great for me so$^!)@$%&

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)