hi allretro tech chris here again welcome backto the channel we're glad you're hereso today we're going to continue ourjourney into december this is a specialmonth where youtubers get together andmake videos about everything dosand today i'm going to show you a videothat i've had in the works or at leastin thought for over a yearwe're going to have a look atperformance comparison and othercomparisons between different dosnetworking methodstoday we're going to look at sevendifferent configurations to see which isking among dos networking componentsso a couple of disclaimers theperformance numbers that you see todayare from my experience and may notrepresent the results you get but anywayi want to share them with youfirst we're going to look at thecontenders then we're going to look atthe different criteria associated withthe contenders and finally we're goingto look at performance a bitfrom there i'll give you my conclusionsand we'll wrap things up so withoutfurther ado let's go[Music]so looking at the contenders there'sreally five different categories that iwant to explore todayfirst we're going to have a look atlantasticthen we're going to have a look at novelnetware also going to look at novellpersonal networkand then we're going to look atmicrosoft smb based clientsand finally an nfs based clientso to ensure there's no disparityi've actually selected a couple of novelservers to connect to for the novellnetware netx client i'm calling it we'regoing to be using an nt 4.0 serverrunning the file and print sharingservices for netware and also to a plainvanilla novel 3.12 serveras for the microsoft smb clients we'regoing to be using the microsoftnetworking client which i call microsoftclient as well as using microsoft landmanagerwe're going to look at a variety ofcategories for each of the clientsincluding the minimum processor requiredthe amount of resident memory requiredand this variesto keep things as compact as possiblewe won't be enabling any sort of file orprint sharing from our clientsalso we'll look at free conventionalmemory on my systemof course this will vary for you we'realso going to look at read speed andwrite speedfor about 70 megabytes worth of datawhich will consist of programs andinstallersand this will be the least scientificportion of the exercisesince wellmany conditions can vary that result ina quicker or a slower read or writespeed in the real world we'll also gradeeach client on ease of setupas well as pop-up message supportand then finally i wanted to conduct anexperiment to seehow hard it would be to share a jetdirect printer for each of theimplementations it was something i wascurious about so i'll show you themethod that i used for each one of theseclient installationsfor ease of setup and switching betweenclients i did create this dos 6.22startup menuwe will be using options 1 through 6today as we do our testingand we will be using option two novellclient for two of the tests[Music]our first contender is lantasticand the setup process for this is reallynice and easy basically we put in acomputer name we say go install herewe can choose whether or not to shareour personal resources which i won't doto conserve memoryand then from there we can set up ournetwork card and i'm using an endisdriver for my 3com cardand that's pretty much it i can alsochoose if i want to set up permanentconnectionsclick ok and before long we go throughthe disk process and we're all set uphere we are at first boot and we'll seejust how long it takes to boot up orrather how shortso it does take a minute there with theredirector but that's it now we're allsetfrom there i launched the net utility sowe can map some drives and connect tothe server it asks us to set the timei mapped drive d to the lantastic drivecand then i mapped drive e to lantasticdrive dpretty easy to doprinters are also a cinch to map thereyou see it nice and easylooking at free memory we will see thatlantastic is a lightweight weighing inat about 65 kilobytes of memory we dohave about 570 free of conventional iwouldn't mind having a little bit moreand maybe there's ways to optimize itthere should be more things that loadhigh in my opinion but again not too badfor a networking enginenext we can look at message sendingabilitiesi'm launching lantastic server on mywindows 95 system which is the serverfrom there we can click send pop-up asyou see there put in the server name andthen put in a brief messageand before long after we hit send itwill be delivered nice and simple and anice little interface and i like theoutput too on the client very cool[Music]as for printing i'm using harvardgraphics 3.0 and this very nice littlechart that i drew which isn't reallyrepresentative of what we're doing butshows a couple of different networkingmethods i figured it would be good toprint out a graphic to get a feel forhow long it takes to printand i was also going to benchmark thisbut i found that every program tookabout 20 to 30 seconds to print out fromstart to finish and that was largelydependent upon spool time so we'll leaveit be and say that it's a prettyconsistent and common printing time foreach of the different networkingimplementations[Music]next we're going to look at the novellnetx clientand you can see me setting this up in myautoexec.batloading all of the necessaryapplications high to make netx workfrom there we have started up and we cango ahead and log into supervisor startupis super fast for a novelllooking at the memory footprint it'sabout 86 kilobytes which is not too badand a fair amount does load highgiving us about 580 kilobytes of freeconventional memory which is greatfor pop-up messages we're going to usethe file and printer services fornetware control panel itemso i'll go ahead and launch thatand then click on users at the bottomleftand from there the supervisor user isselected we'll hit send messageand i can also change this to send toeverybody connected to the server whynotfrom there we can type our littlemessage that we want to sendclick on ok and then ok againand we will see the message appear onthe bottom of the screen on the rightthe clientvery coolnext up we'll look at netx connected toa 3.12 serverand yes it does start up that fasti'll go ahead and get logged in here assupervisor so we can proceedso the first thing i'm going to do islook at the memory footprint just toprove that it's the same for both the nt4.0 and network 3.12 servers very cooleverything is the samefor pop-up support we can go to thenetwork console and use the broadcastcommand you'll notice something noticehow i use mixed case but on the righteverything comes out uppercaseinteresting as for printing we can usethe capture program by using this syntaxhere and we're actually going to attachto a printer on the nt server shared outas a netware print queueso that capture command there will dothat for usand we can log in as supervisor since wedo need to log into that server and wecan also look at the p console commandand change over to that server and lookaround a little bit if we look at printqueue information we can see there areno jobs in the queue we can also seethat a server is attached to this printqueue pretty cool if you do ask menext up is novell personal netware and ilove the setup program lots of optionseasy to useof course the more options you use themore memory you use but it's nice andconfigurableso here we are on first boot of novellpersonal network and we get to run thisfirst time setup where we can eitherchoose to join an existing work group orcreate one we will be joining anexisting oneand with that this part of the setupwill then continue creating an accounton that particular netware pure serverand with that we're all set and we'relogged in and ready to go nice and easyi'll go ahead and do another reboot soyou can see what that looks likeand on boot we will be prompted for ausername which we can go ahead and putinand a password as well if necessarylooking at the memory footprint it is animpressively low 81kand look how most things are loaded highwe have621k a free conventional and very littleof that is personal networkthe user interface is also outstandinghere you can see me mapping a drive todrive f it's super easy to use personalnetwork got it rightnext up i'll demonstrate sending amessage and it's as easy as sayingnetsend from the personal network serveron the left and before long we get ourmessage on the right nice and easy ilove itas for printers we are going to map tothe printer on the nt 4.0 server so i doneed to enable the ability to connect tobindery based novell serversafter that we do also have to specify inthe net tool if we want to see it i'mnot sure why that's not default butthat's finefrom there we can put in a username andpress enter for the passwordand we can then go ahead and find ourprinter that it lives on that otherserver and i'll go ahead and map it tolpt1 and from there we'll be all setnice and easyso next up we have microsoft lan manageryou can see me running the setup programherewe will install the enhanced version oflan manager and from there we can selectour network card driver as you see medoing hereget that all installed and then i'mgoing to also choose all protocols herethough i really shouldn't more on thatlatermoving along we can put in a subnet maska default gateway or other settings wewant to put in and move forward give acomputer name a username and a domain orworkgroup nameand also enable messaging support butnot windows support though we could ifwe wantedi also let land manager maximize memorythough i'm not sure what that does moreon thatso here we are doing first boot of lanmanager and you are going to noticesomethingit is veryvery slowthe tcpip initialization part takesforever but as the saying goes goodthings come to those who waitwe put on our password and we get towait some more as some browser discoveryis done i believe or at least i thinkthat's what's happeninglooking for a server to log intoand sometime later it will saynothing found but you can move onso we would like tolooking at memory usage this uses awhopping 319 kilobytes of memoryholy smokes we have 402 kilobytes offree conventional memory that's it thisthing is a hog lan manager does comewith a nice little user interfaceit's a touch clunkywe can go ahead and connect to somedrives and servers i'll demonstrateconnecting to the lantastic server whichis also set up to be an smb server wecan go ahead and map a drive we can mapa printer and although it's not theeasiest it does get the job doneand we're able to map things ipersonally prefer the command line butthis is certainly an option if you wantto use itso as far as sending messages i will besending a message from win pop-up inwindows 95however for the performance portion ofthis video that you will see later weactually use the nt 4.0 server to be thefile server for our smb clients nicemessage on the right nice dialog boxvery coolfor printing i went ahead and remappedthe printer since i did actually do areboot between the time that i initiallyset this upand i thought i'd go ahead and runharvard graphics and here we go and lookat that program too big to fit intomemoryso i went ahead and commented out themsdlc and netbui protocols and wentahead and rebootedwith this our memory footprint is nowdown to 243 kilobytes from 319so we did save some memory and we havemore conventional memory available nowand are able to print accordinglynext up is microsoft network clientand we can set our username as well asconfigure various options so that wehave just the tcpip protocol sometimeswe learn from our past mistakesand that will minimize the memory usageof course i set up my network card aswellthe setup is a little bit clunky forthis but it gets the job done you justhave to know to tab around between thedifferent windowsso here we are on first startup andwhile not the slowest this is definitelynot the fastest either but eventually wedo get prompt for a username andpassword and the request to save this toa password file looking at the memoryfootprint for this we can see that itwill use about 124 kilobytes of memoryand looking at free conventional we cansee that we have 452 kilobytes not greatms client does have this nice littlegraphical utility for mapping drives andprintersi like the simplicity of it pretty coolyou can certainly use it again i doprefer the command line but it is niceto usenext we have xfsand xfs is a little bit more complex toset upthere is this host file that you have tomodifythe opportunity to hand edit files canresult in errors and there's no realgraphical way to set things up so thatmakes difficulty a little bit higher forthisand from there there's this init filethat we also have to set up againa little bit cumbersome but if youunderstand it you will be able to do itand i do have a tutorial on thisi'm also setting up a mount for aprinter and a file system as welland from there we need to change the xfsbat to load the right packet driver andfrom there also add last drive z toconfig systhat said startup is lightning fast asyou see here which is pretty awesomethe memory footprint also isn't bad with68k of resident memory i just wish morewould load high so i would have morefree conventional memory than the 563kwe haveas far as looking at things there is anxfs tool show which will show you theconnections you have and there's theability to also map things using the xfstoolnot nice and graphical but it gets thejob done so here we have a comparison ofthe different clientsand as promised i told you i would tellyou what the minimum processorrequirement isfor all clients but personal netware andxfsthis system will run on an 8088 nowif you have an 8088 system where you canupgrade to a v20 you are in luckpersonal netware and xfs will run on av20 processor and i do run these on mytandy1000hxas for resident memorywe can see that lan manager and msclient are indeed hogs nowif we were to enable file sharing on thelocal system for lantastic or personalnetworkthe memory usage would also go upand as noted for personal network weincreased the memory usage so that wecould indeedprint to a binary based server sothere are ways to increase the memoryfootprint if you're not carefulthat said i am very impressed bylantastic and by xfs when it comes tomemory usagelooking at free conventional memorywhich again is just a measure on mysystem and will vary from system tosystemi am extremely impressed with personalnetworkas far as ease of setup most of theseare pretty easy to set up with the righttutorialthere is some hand editingxfs was the most cumbersome but notterrible and we do have procedures onsetting up all of these so with that itis possiblewe can see that the majority of clientsalso support pop-up except for ms clientand xfsand as far as sharing printers areconcerned there is a way to do it thoughi will say i spent the most amount oftimetrying to figure out how to either shareprinters or solve weird bugs but in theend i found a solution for each one ofthese and all procedures are listed inthe video link below with most of thesetups actually having videos tocorrespond[Music]next let's have a look at writeperformance and i have sped this up 20xwe will see the various systems herecopying about 70 megabytes of datalantastic finishes first followed by thenetwares and then from there lan managerms client and xfs do take a little bitlongerlooking at read speed there was a degreeof disparity and i think this resultedfromland manager and ms client struggling tocopy some of these ms office cab filesit froze foreverit may be a bug in writing or maybethere's a buffer that can be increasedbut the performance was not good by anorder of magnitude when it came to landmanager and ms clientand here you can see we have our resultsonce again that write speed for landmanager and ms client sticks out like asore thumb taking almost seven minuteswhereas the majority of the clientswrote in about two or threeand as for read speed you can see thatpretty much all of the clients were inline with each otherhowever it does look like we have aclear winner here and that would belantastic[Music]here we have everything we've looked attoday in one big table for yourconvenienceand it was really an interesting study iwas really surprised to see some of theresults in particular the fact thatlantastic was so fast which was reallyreally cool and also the most memoryefficientso as far as winners and losers for me ihave to declare lantastic a winnernowthat's not to say that it meets allapplications in a lot of cases iactually use lan manager and the reasonwhy is because it connects easily to smbshares and wellwe live in a microsoft ecosystem when itcomes to windows and dos it's just moreconvenient but there's no question thatyou pay a penalty by using land manageror some other smb client on an ms-dossystem[Music]i did have a couple of weird performancesnafus with xfsi can't really explain why it might havebeen a config system or auto exec batsettingso that made it kind of interesting butall in all it performed very wellof course the downside to xfsis it connects to a pc nfsd client whichis not currentbut if you're interested installing itit can be done and built from sourcecode and of course we do have aprocedure on how to do that here on thechannelwhen it comes to netware i have to sayit's the rock it's always kind of been asolid foundation for dos networkingit has support in windows nt windows 95most windows versions that were of theretro era and it's a great choicei was very impressed with theperformance of all of my netex clientapplications here and was very impressedwith what personal network brought tothe tableso all in all each one of thesesolutions has its pluses and minuses andapplicationsand also i'll say it again the readspeeds and write speeds that i got weremine and you may not have somethingsimilarso i encourage you to try out a varietyof these methods if you're looking toset up your own dos networkall right well that's what i had for youtoday i hope you enjoyed it i hope youfind it informative and that you go outand try some of these methods and maybein the future i'll look at some othermethods i've been meaning to look at decpathworks and maybe there's others aswelldefinitely subscribe to the channelthere's more content on the way ringthat notification bell and you'll benotified when that new content isavailable if you liked what you sawtoday please give me a thumbs up ireally appreciate it in all cases it'sbeen great having you along for theretro journey and i look forward toseeing you next time but until thenbye for now[Music]you