My 'intranet' : Setting up Windows networking

Chances are, when you installed Windows for Workgroups, you may not have bothered with the networking components.
I installed Windows for Workgroups as it was a later version of the then-popular Windows 3.1 and it was, in my experience, more reliable. I also figured paying a little extra for the peer to peer networking wasn't that big a thing, as it was useful to have if needed.

It was almost a decade later that I put the networking components into use!

First...

You will have a group in program manager called Network. Open it, then double-click on the icon Set up network.

Click the lower of the three options, to set up your adaptors...

Your window will probably be blank. You need to first click on the Add adaptor setting to add the drivers for your adaptor. The exact method depends upon your network card. If Windows has a driver, you can install it (you'll need your Windows setup discs). If you downloaded a driver, then choose the entry for Updated or unlisted driver and then point Windows to the location of the oemsetup.inf file. It should be around someplace in the driver pack that you downloaded, or on the vendor's disc.
If all else fails, try the NE2000 driver and hope for the best!

If you bought a new card, it should have suitable instructions...

Once you have installed your adaptor, you can install your protocols. If you do not have IPX/SPX and NetBEUI installed, then click the Add protocol button and install them.
Do not waste time looking for TCP/IP, you don't have it...yet...

When you have done that, click on Close (it will appear at the top right, it isn't on my window as I had not modified anything when I took this screenshot).

You are now back at the window with the three options. Click on the middle button to decide what you wish to share.

Here, I have selected to share drives and not to share printers. A good choice as it is the data that I'm interested in, and I've no printer attached!
Choose your share options and click on OK.

You will now be back at the window with the three options. You can ignore the top option. It is only of relevence if you are setting up multi-protocol or non-standard networks. By default, the options are set to work with a MicroSoft compatible network. That suits us fine...

Click on the Accept icon and prepare for loads of disc swapping!

You will get a few status warnings, probably for config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini, and protocol.ini. Pay attention in case it reports it was unable to modify things. This PC, for example, uses a config.sys boot menu to choose whether or not to boot into Windows, autobooting into Windows if the user does nothing for 10 seconds. Consequently, the setup refused to touch config.sys and autoexec.bat. The changes had to be made manually.

You will then see...

Leave it at the back some place. You don't want to restart just yet!

Your drivers and protocols installed, you will want to set the basic configuration. Open the Control Panel and click on Network...

Enter your computer name. This should be the same as you set up on the RISC OS side. I have nominated this PC to be known as "MOMSPC", so that it is.
Leave the Workgroup as WORKGROUP.

Windows for Workgroups seems a bit 'odd' with it's user authentication. Simply give yourself a user name (I chose MOM) and don't bother with a password. Windows will probably ask you to confirm your username/password at some later date. Simply check the username and don't bother with the password. It will stop asking.

Click the Startup icon in the options list...

Don't log on at startup. You are not part of a network with a 'host', so logging on is pointless.
Don't use the network DDE. This may make a few things stop working, but it makes the system faster.
Do ghosted connections.
Don't enable WinPopup 'cos it is evil... :-)

In the performance priority, set up the running and sharing tradeoff as you prefer. The PC is not currently being used as anything other than a file server, but that is expected to change quite soon, so I have set it to run it's own tasks at maximum speed; thus meaning it pays much less attention to the network.

Some timings to illustrate...

It is a 486DX/4 66MHz processor, 8Mb RAM, running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 LanMan via TCP/IP. The settings were for applications to run fastest.

My RISC OS 3.7 machine is a 40MHz ARM710 machine running OmniClient 2.04 and Samba 0.07a.

Transferring 6 files each 738358 bytes, deleting the originals, took 73 seconds.
That's a total transfer of 4430148 bytes of data, plus whatever overheads for deleting the files and the TCP/IP packets etc. As far as the data itself is concerned, it went from there to here at approximately 60K a second.

Too slow for you? Play with the performance settings. Get your preferred trade-off between share speed and application speed. Knocking the slider to resources shared fastest had a dramatic effect on the speed of networking between the two machines. Play around with it, the results are instant (no rebooting required), and see what feels best.

Click OK; and in the options list click Event log.

What you log is up to you. I suggest connections, disconnections, and unsuccessful connections. Click OK when you are happy, and OK again in the network setup window.

Remember this?

Now's the time to click on restart.

While it is restarting, we can think about setting up TCP/IP.
That is the next step...