IPX-over-IP with VDE?So, it's
#DOSember. A lot of us are playing our favorite DOS games, or trying some new ones. Most are probably sticking to emulators, though some of us prefer real hardware. This has me thinking about the possibility of getting together to play some old-school classics over the net. Most DOS games only support the IPX protocol, so they're not directly compatible with the TCP/IP-based Internet. In the past we had services like Kali and Kahn, but those are long-gone. DOSbox and many of its derivatives have built-in IPX-IP tunnelling. But what about real machines?
I had an idea: it'd probably be possible to set up a tunnel using
VDE. Each player would need a modern Linux machine that's connected to the same LAN as their DOS boxen. Every Linux box would run an instance of
vde_switch, while the "host" would additionally run a world-reachable SSH server.
ip link add br0 type bridge # create a bridge device
ip link set dev br0 up # mark it "up" without assigning an IP addr
ip tuntap add tap0 mode tap # create a TAP device
ip link set dev tap0 up # as before
ip link set tap0 master br0 # tie the TAP device to the bridge
ip link set eth1 master br0 # tie the real NIC for the DOS machines
# to the bridge
vde_switch -s /tmp/vde.ctl -m 666 -M /tmp/vde.mgt -t tap0 -d # start VDE
The above assumes you're using a separate network adapter to connect to your DOS machine(s), rather than simply hooking the DOS rig up to your main LAN. These commands will work on Debian with the
bridge-utils package installed; other distros might require different syntax. It might also work on *BSD but I haven't tried it myself; you'd use your system's TAP and bridge setup tools in that case.
For the host that should be it. Clients will need to run this command to connect:
dpipe -d -P /tmp/vde.pgrp \
/usr/bin/vde_plug /tmp/vde.ctl = \
ssh gameguest@host.example.com vde_plug
This assumes the host has set up an account called "gameguest" for clients to use. The account must be able to write to
/tmp/vde.ctl but needs no other permissions.
So, what's everyone think? I use a setup like this for my local "retronet" but I've never actually tried it remotely before, and I don't actually know how well it'd handle non-TCP/IP traffic, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
#RetroComputing #DOSGaming #DOScember #DOS 
