Broadband
ST
One by one, Edward
Baiz adds his Ataris to his home Ethernet LAN
Hello again
everyone, Gamer here to bring up another article
I hope you all will enjoy. If
you read my article concerning MagiCNet and
MintNet, you know that I have a LAN
set up in my computer room in which I have my
Hades060 and my wife's PC hooked up
to the internet using an Ethernet set-up (cable
modem and router).
Well, I also
have a 4 MB STE system that sits next to my
Hades. After my LAN was successfully
running, I often thought how great it would
be to also have the STE hooked up to
it. Why? Well, for one reason, I wanted
a backup system, for e-mail, just
in case anything happened to my Hades. And if
I wanted to back up my STE hard drive,
it would be easy to transfer the files on to
my Hades and then put them on a
CD. Here
are some pictures of my STE system:
![[Photo: STE on desk]](images/ste_a.jpg)
It has 4 MB of RAM installed
and included one of the newer color Atari monitors
which I like very much.
As you can see, the STE does not have an Atari
mouse. Another Atarian rigged
a PC mouse to work with Atari computers.
I love it because of its nice
feel and smooth action. The piece of hardware
that looks like a small tower,
is actually a PC monitor stand that contains
a hard drive, CD-ROM drive, two 3.5"
floppy drives and a 520ST power supply. I have
not seen anything like it since
it was made back in 1988, but I am sure some
other Atarian has built something
like this. Originally, it was built with the
two 3.5" floppy drives and a
5.25" drive. The 5.25" drive was installed
since at the time, the 5.25" floppies
were still in use. Ten years later, I took out
the 5.25" drive, installed a SCSI
hard drive and then put in a CD writer drive.
Of course I first bought a Link
II host adapter from ICD and had a friend build
me the correct cable. The whole
system works fine with the exception that I
cannot use one of the floppy drives.
My floppy drive A is the internal one in the
STE and drive B is the top drive
in the monitor stand. I have heard there
is a program that exists for the
ST that allows the use of three floppy drives. Still
looking for that one. Oh, one
last thing about my system, I have the monitor
stand on the floor because the desk
that the STE sits on is not deep enough to have
both the STE and the stand on
the desktop.
OK,
now you have an idea what my STE is like, it
is time to get started. When I was setting
up my Hades system I read a lot of articles
on the internet about using an
Atari computer on an Ethernet system. The piece
of hardware I liked was the
EtherNEC sold by Lyndon Amsdon.
His product contains an NE2000
card that is compatible with the ISA bus interface,
the EtherNEC adapter (allows
connection of the ISA bus to the STE through
the cartridge port) and appropriate
drivers for MagiCNet, MintNet and STinG. You
can also order an enclosure that
covers everything. I went ahead and ordered
everything including the cover. The
cost was $70 - $80 and was well worth it. It is
a real nice piece of hardware, looks
great and easily connects to my STE as you can
see.
![[Photo: EtherNEC interface connected to STE]](images/e_nec1.jpg)
Normally I have
the EtherNEC resting on its side on the desk
when I use it.
![[Photo: EtherNEC standing upright]](images/e_nec2.jpg)
As
I said before, the EtherNEC comes with drivers
for MagiCNet, MintNet and STinG. I will
be discussing the installation of the cartridge
port STinG driver.
My STE does not
have MagiC, MiNT or Geneva. I have not felt
the need as yet. Besides, the
STinG installation is the easiest in my opinon.
Of course the first thing to do is
to install STinG. I had a copy of version 1.26
on the Hades that I copied to the
STE. I started out by first putting the files,
STING.PRG and STING.INF, into
my AUTO folder. The STinG package comes with
three CPX files. When using the EtherNEC,
you only need one of them and that is the STNGPORT.CPX
file.
I put that
file into my CPX folder. Next I created the
necessary folder "STING" on drive C. I
copied the STinG drivers into it which were:
- RESOLVE.STX
- SERIAL.STX
- TCP.STX
- UDP.STX
I also copied the EtherNEC driver,
ENEC.STX, into the STING
folder. This driver is for STinG that uses
the cartridge port interface. The
last two files I copied into the STING folder
were DEFAULT.CFG and ROUTE.TAB. That
is it for installing files. The next thing that
needs to be done is an adjustment
of the DEFAULT.CFG and ROUTE.TAB files.
First
the .CFG file. When reading about this file and
the EtherNEC, I found it is best to
leave most of it alone and make only the necessary
adjusments. In other words,
you do not need to change the values for the
MSS, RCV_WND, ICMP_AD... I think
the only thing I adjusted was the ALLOCHEM value.
I only did this since I do have
the full 4 MB of RAM in the STE. Other than that,
I left everything else
the same except for the things I will mention
next. I have Comcast as my
cable broadband provider, so the value for
DOMAIN is "comcast".
The USERNAME
value needs to be entered. My e-mail address
is edbaizjr@comcast.net,
so the USERNAME
value is "edbaizjr". So, then, the
HOSTNAME is "comcast.net". I filled in the
FULLNAME as "Edward S. Baiz Jr.".
Next is the NAMESERVER value. This must be
the IP address of your router. Then I finished
up by filling in the values for EMAIL,
SMTP_HOST, POP_HOST, POP_USERNAME and POP_PASSWORD.
These you should have and
are self-explanatory. Once you have all this
entered, save it.
Next
comes the ROUTE.TAB file adjustment and that
is a little tricky. When you open this
file, at the bottom, you will see groups of
numbers with the word "Modem 1"
in a line. At the beginning, you can read an
explanation of the entries in the line.
You need to enter in your gateway IP address,
the subnet mask and the port being used.
In my case, the gateway IP address is 192.168.1.1,
the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0
and the port is Ethernet. These numbers must
be entered, but the point I must
stress is that you cannot change the number
of spaces between each group in
the line. If you do, the system will not work.
You can test to see if you entered
the values correctly by loading in the STinG
dialler program. Click on the action
"Tools" and then "Routing Table".
If nothing appears on the screen after you do
this, then you entered the numbers in wrong
and/or the spaces between the groups
were changed. From reading and from
the advice of others, there
needs to be two lines in the ROUTE.TAB file.
Below is what I found to work just
fine:
#0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 EtherNet 192.168.1.1 #192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 EtherNet 0.0.0.0
When I checked
the above with the STinG dialler Tools, this
is what it looked like:
![[Photo: Routing table]](images/route_tb.jpg)
Notice that in the second line, even though my
ROUTE.TAB file has 192.168.1.1
typed in, the result that comes up is 192.168.1.0
comes up. I do not know
why this happens and I do not care. I only care
that the system works (An address ending with
0 is a network address, it identifies
the network itself rather than an individual
host - Ed).
The
last thing that needs adjusting is the STNGPORT.CPX
file. This part is really simple.
Bring up the CPX file. Click on "Addressing"
and then "EtherNet". You will get
something that looks like this:
![[Screen-shot: STinG IP address configuration]](images/sting_2.gif)
As you can see, you need to fill
in your IP address of the Atari computer you
are working with. I first had to
configure my router to add in my STE. Next,
type in the subnet mask which for most
will be "255.255.255.0". Finally, make sure the
little box to the left of the word
"Active" is checked. Save it
here and then you are done.
Now,
the next obvious step is to connect the EtherNEC
to the cartridge port of the computer.
Of course when you do this, Lyndon recommends
that the computer be off. When
you turn on the computer, look at the back of
the EtherNEC. The yellow light
(top light) should be on which shows the card
is getting power.
![[Photo: Back of EtherNEC]](images/back_1.jpg)
As a final check to make sure the NE2000 card is
being recognized correctly, go
back into the STNGPORT.CPX file. Click on "General",
then "EtherNet".
If the card is installed correctly, you
will see something like this:
![[Screen-shot: MAC address configuration]](images/sting_1.gif)
Now connect a Cat-5 cable as shown in the picture
above. If you have an Ethernet
connection, the green light (below the yellow
light) should be come on as
in this picture:
![[Photo: Green link status light]](images/back_2.jpg)
If you have other computers
in your LAN, the quickest way to test the STE
Ethernet connection, is
to again use the STinG dialler. Go in under "Tools"
and then to the ping utility.
Just type in the IP address of one of the computers
in the LAN and hopefully you
will see data flowing. Another way would be
to run programs like CAB.
Well
I hope this article gives you some insight as
to how the EtherNEC works. Installation
was simple for me (about 30 minutes) and I hope
it will be simple for you.
Remember that this wonderful piece of hardware
will work on any Atari computer
that has a cartridge port. I have talked with
Carey Christenson who successfully
got this to work on his Falcon under STinG.
Let me say that if you have any
questions, please e-mail me at MyAtari
or Lyndon.
edward@myatari.net
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