Linux Journal: Setting Up an Old 386 on Your Home Network

“My system, tenn, (short for Tennessee Tuxedo, a cartoon penguin
in the US) is a dual-boot Linux/MS 3.1 PI/166MHz with a 6.4GB hard
drive and a PCI NIC. My wife’s system, hilde, is a Compaq 386/25e
with a 120MB hard drive and a NE2000 clone NIC that I added. Patch
cables go from both systems to a D-Link 8-port hub. Looking at the
software, she has MS-DOS version 5.0 on her computer. I have a
standard install of SuSE 7.2 pro on my system.

“The idea was to set this up so that my system was a fileserver
to her system. I solved the fileserver problem two times. The first
time she wanted to be able to connect to my system as if it was her
DOS d: partition. To do this, I set up Microsoft’s DOS Network
client on her computer and then started Samba on my Linux
system.

“New problem: when I told my wife that I had used MS software to
get her system connected, she was not amused at all and demanded
that I use open-source software only. It did not sway her when I
explained that she was already running MS-DOS. Her reasoning was
that MS-DOS was written before MS became the evil empire, so it was
okay…”

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