30 May 2004

It All Started With An Idea ...

Ideas are dangerous things. Naturally you would think that I, as a writer of fiction, would understand that particular notion better than your average person, but apparently I do not. Leastwise, you would never know it from the last few days.

A little background, first: I own two computers. My primary machine is a custom built system which I have named Nemesis. This is the computer on which I am currently writing this little dissertation. My other system is an old IBM ThinkPad 370C laptop which I picked up for a song. It’s my portable writing machine. In other words, it’s a glorified typewriter.

Up until now I have been transferring files between these machines through one of two methods, depending on how much data I have to move. For small data files, story files, I have been using traditional SneakerNet, copying the files in question to a floppy disk and transferring them to the other machine through a simple copy operation. When moving larger quantities of information, such as the install set for some programs, I have been using a direct cable connection via the parallel ports of the two machines. Both of these methods work extremely well, but they’re a pain in the ass to implement. There has to be an easier way to do it, I thought to myself.
There is. It would be a simple matter for me to set up a network connection between the two machines, wouldn’t it? I mean, I have the router, and I have the cables, and I have a network card installed in the Nemesis. All I would need to do is pick up a network card for the laptop and Bob’s Your Uncle, right?

So I bought a cheap (not so cheap as I would have liked, but you take what you can get) 16-bit PCMCIA network card for the laptop, brought it home, and installed it. The card was recognized by the computer and I was able to install a driver. Good so far. I set up the router and connected all the cables, then set about configuring the two systems so that they can talk to each other.

The theory behind networking two computers together in a peer-to-peer setup is pretty simple, actually. As long as both computers have the same network client installed and the same protocols, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to make it work. That’s the theory, anyway. As a practical matter there are sometimes little bits of technical wizardry that must be performed in order to make things work. Most of these things are relatively common knowledge and therefore can be looked up on the Internet, so I wasn’t all that worried. Besides, once upon a time I was a professional computer technician, and I’d like to think I still know a thing or two about these little machines. This shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Once both computers are configured with the same clients and the same network protocols, then you should be able to go to Network Neighbourhood, or My Network Places and verify that your two computers see each other. It may take a couple of minutes for them to appear, but that’s okay. I expect that to happen, and it did happen. It happened for all of about two minutes. Then things went to hell in a handbasket.

What I’m getting now is frustrating, to say the least. The Nemesis side of the network is working just fine. I can ping the router, so I know that the connection on that side is working. The laptop side is another matter. Whenever I try to ping some other resource, like the router or the Nemesis, I get wonderful messages like Destination Host Unreachable and other such filth. What this means is simple, for some strange reason the laptop doesn’t want to connect to my little network. Now I have to sit down and figure out why.

I’ve done everything that I know how to do. I’ve gone into Safe Mode and removed all of the Ghost Drivers that I could find. I’ve uninstalled the network card driver and reinstalled it more times than I can count. I’ve even subjected the laptop to a series of Format & Restore operations just for the sake of starting with a clean Operating System. So far nothing seems to work.

I would have to have to return the network card, as it was the only one I’ve been able to find that stood a chance in hell of working with the laptop, but if I can’t get these two machines to talk to each other then I may not have much of a choice in the matter. This is annoying, but not debilitating.

The good news is that I’ve learned a few things along the way. I’ve learned that installing Windows 95 on a laptop is more of a pain in the ass than Microsoft would like us to believe, especially where PCMCIA services are concerned. The services don’t install automatically, so you have to install them yourself before your PCMCIA slots will work. Anytime you remove the card and reinsert it you have to reinstall the driver, which is a pain in the ass in and of itself.

But the good news is that everything now seems to be working. At least, it was for a moment, but now I know what the problem is. The problem is the drivers for the PCMCIA card services. They aren’t persistent, and they’ll corrupt in the middle of an operation, right when you least want them to. As soon as that happens your carefully crafted network connection goes straight to hell. So much for painless networking.

As soon as I can get the connection reestablished I’m going to see about copying over the install set for Windows 98 or Windows ME and upgrading the OS to something where that’s less likely to happen. Of course, that’s assuming I’m even able to reestablish the connection. That in itself could prove to be an adventure.

You know I remember setting up the network at the computer store I used to work at, back in the days when Peer-To-Peer networking was just getting started. We had a hell of a time setting that network up the first time, which prompted us to be mighty careful whenever we were upgrading machines. I had almost forgotten what a pain in the ass those days were. I won’t be forgetting for a while.

31 May 2004

Well, that was fun.

The good news is that I have a working network. The even better news is that it seems likely to stay working this time, a fact which has me somewhat tempted to jump for joy.

After my experience with the PCMCIA drivers in Windows 95 I decided to upgrade the system to Windows 98. The problem with that lies in the fact that my laptop doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive. Not a problem, I thought. I’ll just join the parallel ports of the two machines together and use Direct Cable Connection to copy the install set for Windows 98 onto my laptop’s hard drive.

Problem: Direct Cable Connection doesn’t want to establish a connection between the two machines, in either direction. So, after cursing and swearing a blue streak, I went through my software collection and came across something I had forgotten about.
Once upon a time I had acquired a copy of Lap Link Pro. I had stopped using it over the years because Direct Cable Connection had always worked as an alternative and didn’t require me to leave Windows, but I still kept the program around. I installed it on both machines, dropped down to DOS mode, and fired them up. The parallel port on Nemesis passed the self test the first time, but I had to reset the configuration on the port on the laptop before Lap Link would declare the port worthy.

The copy process took just over an hour, which is a hell of a lot shorter than it would have taken under Direct Cable Connection. There’s something to be said for leaving Windows behind every now and again and working directly with the hardware, the way we used to.

Installation of Windows 98 occupied another hour, but I had a stable operating system at the end and I didn’t have to reinstall the PCMCIA services, which pleased me to no end. I inserted the network card and installed the driver, but when I restarted the computer I wasn’t able to get a network connection. So I went into Device Manager and had a look. The network card was disabled. I enabled it and restarted the computer, but still didn’t have a network connection.

Back into Device Manager I went, this time to discover that there was a resource conflict between my PCMCIA modem and my PCMCIA network card. I fiddled with the resources until Windows pronounced there were no conflicts, and then restarted the system. As Windows was coming up I saw a pop up on the screen which announced that the network card wasn’t working and that I had to set it up again. Well, that’s okay, it just means I have to reinstall the driver and that’s easy.

I stopped the service to that card and removed it, then put it back in. Windows detected it and took care of the driver magic behind the scenes for me. Next thing I know, I had a working network.

Loud cheers.

I’ve restarted both computers a couple of times and they seem to be willing to reconnect every time. That’s a good thing, I think.
The moral of this story is, if you’re going to connect a computer running Windows XP to a computer running Windows 9X in a Peer-to-Peer configuration then it’s a really bad idea to use Windows 95. The system simply is not reliable enough so you won’t be happy with the results. Use Windows 98 or Windows Millennium instead; You’ll thank me for it.

And to think, it all started with an idea.