Virtual Network - how to

Alistair George · Jun 29, 2006

Hi I posted an earlier question about DOS nobody bothered to reply does support not browse this forum?

Question: I have read the help and attempted to set up a Virtual Network within a DOS machine. The idea was to be able to move files from say XP to DOS in the virtual drive that way.
Can anyone confirm or deny that what I am trying to do is possible. If so, could you please point out what I may be doing wrong in setting it up as I tried both types including host and defined IP address etc.
Cheers,
Alistair.
PS being able to move files within the same machine to and from virtual drive via the network would be preferential I guess in many cases.

persike · Jun 29, 2006

Hi Alistair,

does DOS not have a Samba implementation via the "net use" command? If so, things get easy from here:

1. Enable Samba in your Mac OS: System Preferences | Sharing | Windows Sharing

2. Edit your Samba configuration file to include some folder on your Mac drive that you want to share with XP: go to the folder /etc on your system volume. In this folder you find a file named smb.conf. Open this file with TextEdit.
To add a share, add the following lines:

[somename]
comment = somename
path = /Volumes/Shaun/virtualdrive
browseable = yes
read only = no
create mode = 0770

This will tell Samba that you want to add a shared drive named "somename" which points to the folder /Volumes/Shaun/virtualdrive on your harddisk.

3. Assign a manual IP to your Parallels Network Adapter in Mac OS: go to System Preferences | Network | Parallels Host-Guest Adapter. Switch IP-setting to "manual" and give the adapter a private IP, say 192.168.1.50 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0

4. Shut down your VM in case it's running. Switch the network setup to "Host-only networking" in the VM preferences.

5. In your Windows system, give the Parallels network adapter an IP in the same range as done in 3., say 192.168.1.51 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. To enable internet access from within the guest machine you'd have to enable internet sharing in Mac OS. But that's another matter.

6. Now your Windows guest system has an IP address in the same range as the Parallels Host-Guest Adapter in Mac OS. You may now try and ping the Mac side from within Windows. If that works, you're nearly there.

7. Try to connect to your Samba share via "net use" from within DOS or through "map network drive" from Windows explorer. You can use the address \\192.168.1.50\somename, as defined in steps 2. and 3.

That should work with the nice side effect hat you can access that virtual drive from Windows, DOS and Mac OS, even from another VM running Linux or else. I hope it fits your needs,

Kind regards, Malte.

Alistair George · Jun 29, 2006

Thanks Malte; will give it a go - I actually need networking between WinXP and DOS, not Mac but your information should be sufficient. Will advise how it goes appreciate.

constant · Jun 29, 2006

.
Just posted into what I now know to be a reposting of your problem.

Others, perhaps including you may feel otherwise, but I think reposting twice due to no answer after just one day is unreasonable.

You may not have received a reply as the drag and drop issue has been extensively discussed here in these forums. If you have trouble getting search results, someone here may be able to help.
.

persike · Jun 29, 2006

I actually need networking between WinXP and DOS

Yep, you get that with the Samba solution. Every client connected to the Samba share can exchange data with any other client. It would be different if you required the data exchange to be exclusively possible between WinXP and DOS.

BTW, if I got the Parallels announcement correctly, several severe bugs in the Shared Folders functionality of Parallels Desktop have been resolved. So instead of going the itchy Samba way you might want to use the simpler approach via Shared Folders. Every Shared Folder can be mapped Samba-like through "net use" or "map network drive" from Windows Explorer, respectively. The network address of a Shared Folder is \\.psf\somename.

tgrogan · Jun 29, 2006

Alistair, you would network the DOS VM to your XP host exactly as you would if there were a wire between the two computers. I have long since forgotten all of the details of doing this via Novell and early MS networking, but I would bet that getting a TCP/IP capability for DOS would be a good starting place in this day. You would also need a DOS driver for the virtual network card in the VM - good luck on that one.

Only in your dreams would drag and drop work. DOS doesn't have any senders or receptors for such technology.

The only other solution I could think of that I would attempt in Linux would be to use a floppy image to pass things back and forth. You could map the image to your DOS VM and write and read on the XP end. Linux has some good utilities to make this usable, but I don't know about XP.

tgrogan · Jun 29, 2006

Wait ho, I have another thought. Since it's obvious that you cannot get to too much hardware in a DOS VM anyway, could you do your work in a Windoze VM DOS terminal session? (or switching into the DOS mode of a win98 VM) The drive mapping is still in effect when you drop into DOS mode, so all you have to do is map the XP share in Windoze to a drive and you can see it in a DOS session.

Alistair George · Jun 29, 2006

tgrogan said:
Only in your dreams would drag and drop work. DOS doesn't have any senders or receptors for such technology.

Sure, thats understandable, however, that should not preclude the ability of for example, having a file manager which works above the session whether it be DOS or whatever, that effectively allows the moving of files between the virtual machines; if you like an enhanced version of Parallels Image Tool. To have to go through Image Tools, Network setups or whatever should not be required from a sophisticated program I would have thought.

Anyway thanks for the help by all and I will try network setup as advised.

Re CONSTANT comments:
<You may not have received a reply as the drag and drop issue has been extensively discussed here in these forums. If you have trouble getting search results, someone here may be able to help.>
No need for patronising comments. I searched for 'Copy' and got few results. I also searched for DOS and got few results. It just so happens my suggestion for 'drag n drop' is what you cottoned on to, but the real issue is inablity to copy between in my case Windows XP and DOS. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to pursue the networking method.
Alistair.

persike · Jun 30, 2006

You would also need a DOS driver for the virtual network card in the VM - good luck on that one.

Tgrogan is right, first prerequisite for either the Samba or Shared Folders solutions ist TCP/IP support for DOS. However, you do not necessarily need the Parallels virtual network driver. As in WinXP, a standard Realtek RTL8029 driver should work, too. Maybe you try one of the free compatible DOS versions available.

Regards, Malte

tgrogan · Jun 30, 2006

Alistair George said:
Sure, thats understandable, however, that should not preclude the ability of for example, having a file manager which works above the session whether it be DOS or whatever, that effectively allows the moving of files between the virtual machines; if you like an enhanced version of Parallels Image Tool. To have to go through Image Tools, Network setups or whatever should not be required from a sophisticated program I would have thought.

I would urge you to explore all of the other technologies that allow running more than one OS at a time and see which ones allow drag and drop between them before assuming that it is just another programming problem. I've used all but Virtual PC, and drag and drop stays on all of their wish lists. If you get networking going between the host and guest, the file managers in either of them can access and move files between them just as you have described. With windoze at least it is very unadvisable to keep data on the same partition as the operating system anyway, so a shared drive is the most logical method of common access to data. Having the OS on a virtual drive and shared data drives is the best way to share data among multiple machines - virtual or not - that's why all of the companies that I've seen use servers as file servers first.

Further, you can share any of the folders in a virtual machine's drive and move files between them now. You can move files between multiple virtual machines (running of course) and the host now from any of them. What else are you looking for?