EtherDFS is an 'installable filesystem' TSR for DOS. It maps a drive from a remote computer (typically Linux-based) to a local drive letter, using raw ethernet frames to communicate.Copyright © 2017-2023 Mateusz Viste
EtherDFS is an 'installable filesystem' TSR for DOS. It maps a drive from a remote computer (typically Linux-based) to a local drive letter, using raw ethernet frames to communicate.
For years, I was using LapLink to transfer files between my various "retro" computers. It works, yes, but it's also annoyingly slow and requires constant attention. One day I thought, "Wouldn't it be amazing if all my DOS PCs could share a common network drive, similarly to how NFS operates in the *nix world?". This day EtherDFS was born.
I clearly didn't invent anything - the concept has been around almost as long as the first IBM PC, and several commercial products addressed that need in the past. I am not aware, however, of any free and open-source solution. Besides, all the commercial solutions I know of require to set up a pretty complex network environment first, while EtherDFS doesn't need anything more than just a packet driver.
EtherDFS is documented through the following files:
You can get all EtherDFS files from the download area.
These are adaptations of EtherDFS made by other people. I do not vouch for them.
Frank Haeseler made an EtherDFS version compatible with DOS 3.20 and 3.30: EtherDFS-3.
Eric Voirin proposes a fork of ethersrv-linux tolerant to varying filenames capitalization, thus allowing to serve files from a case-sensitive filesystem: ethersrv-linux-866.
Wondering about using EtherDFS on a no-NIC computer, using its LPT port? Read this article I posted on my gopher.
I had to use a few tricks to make EtherDFS as small as possible, in spite of being written in C. If you're curious, I logged this journey here.