Alllrrriiigggggggttt!!
I've cracked it. We now have TCP/IP networking at the office.
(Who cracked it?)
(Well, you did. Thankyou Tannin.)
As expected, it turned out to be simple enough once you know how. But believe you me, finding out how to use an ECS 1.01 server to provide an internet sharing connection to the two Windows boxen on the office network wasn't easy. It is now , er , 12:30AM and I've been at it ...
(Tea!)
... er .. sorry, Tannin has been at it since 5:15 PM.When you get the security company ringing up on your mobile to ask if you forgot to switch the alarm on, you know it's late. And bloody cold. I hate winter.
Now that I know how to do it, I could set it up on another machine in, oh, about five minutes. I estimate that it's taken me ... er ... sorry, it's taken Tannin maybe 30 or 40 hours to work it out. And some help from Sol.
(Er, by the way, Tannin, why didn't you just ask the local OS/2 expert? A town this size, there is bound to be one.)
(I am the local OS/2 expert, you idiot.)
(Oh. Right. Sorry.)
The trouble isn't lack of documentation, indeed, it's the reverse: Warp/ECS is drowning in bloody documentation, but a great deal of it doesn't apply. Buggered if I know why it is so.
(It's quite simple, little sister: Originally OS/2 had no native networking built into it. For that, there was another product, which began as the joint Microsoft/IBM LAN Server, and later on metamorhosed into Microsoft's NT Advanced Server and IBM's OS/2 LAN Server , which itself became Warp Server - at a cool $1500 bucks a copy or so. You might remember, back in the early days of our office network, that we ran Lantastic for OS/2.)
(No, I don't remember. That was before I was born.)
(Oh yes, of course. Anyway, they realised, rather late in the piece, that network connectivity was a serious selling point: IBM had laughed at Windows for Workgroups, derided it as the pitiful product that it was, and then been very surprised when the average idiot went out and bought it anyway. I mean, real networks used LAN Server, or Netware, none of this whimpy peer to peer stuff. So they decided that they had better stick some networking in for themselves. This was the genesis of Warp Connect - which we duly ran out and bought. Warp's networking component - IBM Peer to Peer Networking, as they called it - was something that came readily to hand for IBM, they simply stripped some of the fancy stuff out of Warp Server and stuck that in.)
(Which is why Windows networks and OS/2 networks are so easy to connect together, yes? Because both products are essentially updated versions of the original IBM/Microsoft LAN Server? Except that Microsoft go and do stupid proprietary extension things to break it from time to time, yes?)
(Pretty much, yeah. Anyway, now comes the tricky bit, and it has to do with the oddities of IBM as an organisation. At the time that Warp Connect came out, IBM were just starting to get their gifted but tiny minds around a concept called "Time to Market". Up until now, they hadn't actually realised that, if it's a good idea, it's actually a good idea to do something practical about it this decade - hell, sometimes you should even aim to get things out of the preliminary commitee stages in the very same year.)
(Wow! Radical!)
(Too right it was radical. Good Lord, they even had people take their suits off and walk around in T-shirts and (ever so neatly pressed) jeans for a while. But you could still smell the suit - some things never wash off. You see, Tea, IBM are very, very clever, and very, very stupid. If IBM was a person, you'd say right away, "this person has severe Aspberger's Syndrome" - very, very good at the really hard things in life, and quite unable to tie his own shoelaces. So when the marketing guys said "we want networking right now" and the management said "yes, give it to them, right away", the engineering types were quite shocked. In fact, they didn't know how to do it, not without breraking all their time honoured rules about very careful testing and getting every last detail right. But they managed: they ripped the main bits out of Warp Server, left out the fancy big-network stuff, and it worked just fine. But when it came to the documentation side of things ... this was too hard.)
(You mean like their pitiful efforts to be trendy and have nice coloured boxes and stuff?)
(Exactly. So they started at both ends and worked towards the middle.)
(And this is why the Warp Peer to Peer documentation is so voluminous and such a weird mix of heavy detail and horrible big-end-of-town jargon on the one hand, and barely-better-than-Microsoft bubby talk on the other?)
(Exactly.)
(But the information is all there isn't it?)
(Well, yes. But the trouble is - and this is he reason we are still here at the office and it's 1:30AM - that they forgot to take out all the Warp Server specific stuff! I've spent hours and hours getting my mind around the correct way to install and configure a DHCP server, for example, only to find that this version of the networking software doesn't bloody have a DHCP server. And followed up about seven other blind alleys as well.)
(But you got it eventually, didn't you.)
(Yup. I'm not even going to bore you with all the various options I examined - you see, I hate networking, I didn't want to become a home-grown bloody expert on TCP/IP, I just wanted to set you up with some connection sharing so as to let you play with that Folding@Home stuff you've got this bug about. And now that I've learned far more about TCP/I bloody P than I ever wanted to know, I have discovered that it's extremely bloody simple, and I could do the second machine in about ten minutes flat, including time for a cuppa.)
(Err, Tannin?)
(Yes?)
(This was supposed to be my post.)
(Oh. Sorry about that. Look, what's say we go home, and you can have the whole damn computer all to yourself for the night?)
(OK. And can we sleep in in the morning and come to work late?)
(Yeah. Let's!)
