Silly Software Company -=oOo=- A poor man's way of doing things is still a way to get things done

Old PC becomes router

Hardware Preparations

An old PC

Any old Personal Computer. Something with an 486 processor will do, if you can still find those. The one I found (in the basement) is a Pentium, 75 MHz. It has a 600 MB hard disk, and I put 32 MB RAM in it.

DOS ?

Because I'm planning to use 3com 53C509 network cards, I decide to install DOS on this PC so that I can use the 3COM configuration tools to set the IRQ and I/O base of these cards. I'll make it a multi-boot system so that i can use both DOS and Linux).

• start the PC from a DOS boot diskette
• use FDISK to
  • delete any partition on the hard disk
  • create a primary DOS partition - 100MB is more than enough
  • set this partition active
• exit FDISK and reboot from the DOS diskette
• format the partition with FORMAT /U /S
• copy DOS external commands and system files to C:\DOS

Here's a link on where to get DOS

You now have a working DOS computer

configure network cards

Get a copy of 3c5x9cfg.exe, copy it to the DOS machine. You may find it at 3COM : support : drivers and donloads, or at Driver Guide. The original diskette that came with the 3C509 cards was called EtherDisk.

One by one, insert the 3COM 3C509 network interface cards and run 3c5x9cfg to set them a free IRQ and i/O base address. Start with disabling plug and play, then set IRQ, I/O BASE, and other settings. IRQ's 10, 11 and 12 are likely to be available. The 3c5x9cfg will warn you when you've choosen a value that is already in use by an other deviice. You can also the BIOS setup to know what resources are being used already, or try the MSD command.

If you have a different make or model of NIC, you may have to set jumpers or look for a suitable configuration tool (if all else fails, use Google). You might also have a go at doing this under Linux. Or use PCI cards - then you don't need to configure the hardwre yourself.

In this case, the 3c5x9cfg configuration tool also lets you set additional parameters (Full Duplex, Server OS, ...) and tests the cards.

You also need a driver for your network cards. An ODI packet driver is fine. If you don't have the diskette that came with the NIC, these drivers can be found at the manufacturer's site or in driver collections such as Driver Guide. Crynwyr offers reputatedly the best packet drivers.

Assuming the packet driver is called 3c5x9pd.com, copy the file to a location on the path. You then load the driver by just giving this command. It can also be done in a batch file, e.g. autoexec.bat. When using multiple NIC's in 1 machine, you need to load the driver repeatedly, indicating which NIC it is for. In this example, that can be done by specifying the I/O Base Address of each network card :

		3c5x9pd 0x60 IOBASE=0x300
		3c5x9pd 0x61 IOBASE=0x310
		3c5x9pd 0x62 IOBASE=0x320
	

Note that these values are given in hexadecimal notation, indicated by the 0x prefix.

You may test the cards -after they're configured, by putting all 2 (or 3) ... in the computer, load the driver and start the computer. If all is well, you'll see the cards / driver being loaded during startup.

Take inventory

As the next step is to install Linux on this computer, you may want to take inventory of the hardware, by checking the BIOS setup.

While the computer starts, you may see a line on the screen saying something like "press [Enter] for setup". Do that. You'll see the BIOS setup and can write down hardware parameters such as

• IRQ and I/O address of parallel port(s)
• IRQ and I/O address of serial port(s)
• MAC address, IRQ and I/O of each network card - and remember which is which : label them
• your hard disk(s) : size, on which controller(s), ...
• for each hard disk : primary and extended partitions, logical volumes : size, file system, label, ... : you will need this information to recognize them under Linux when deciding where to install Linux.
• ...

Add luxury

The following is unnecessary, but can be helpful - or offers good training to get the hang of things :

• Get networked. You have a 'datalink' on this system, i.e. there's a network card that can communicate with other network cards. On top of that, you may want additional protocols and applications, like maybe :
  • Windows for Workgoups, in full or stripped down to 'DOS for Workgroups' - this will allow you to access sources on other computers which are made accessible with Windows File Sharing
  • TCP/IP for DOS, eg. by Trumpet, to provide basic TCP/IP networking and applications sucht as FTP.
  • Arachne is a web browser and a graphical user interface for DOS TCP/IP networking. It can be used for visually 'browsing the network neighbourhood", without Windows :-).
• Get an old CD-ROM station and install it.

For a CD-ROM to work under DOS, you need to load a driver in config.sys, like this:

	DEVICE=cdrom.sys
	

where cdrom.sys is the filename of your cdrom driver. I find that under DOS, most of these CD-ROM drivers can be used for any CD-ROM.

You then get access to the CD-ROM station by loading mscdex.exe (eg in autoexec.bat). see mscdex /? for details. This produces a drive letter for the CD-ROM drive. This way, yourt CD rom will be available as soon as the system has started.

Both a network connection, and thus internet, and a CD-ROM can be handy to get additional files on to your old machine.