Win95 Network Woes

[rodders]

Finally got my 486 card in my RiscPC to run Win95 - pretty straightforward when you do it right
However, setting up networking is driving me to distraction, the PCPro3 User Guide doesn't have much to say.
I finally got the adapter set up by letting Windows find it and setting the Interrupt to 12 (as configured in !PCConfig which also specifies options -deh1 -ptcpip) before rebooting.
I've added in TCP/IP protocol and set up DNS servers but there are strange problems.
I can ping www.bbc.co.uk successfully but if I try to load it in IE it complains that it can't connect to the server.
If I use the IP address I got from the ping, it loads the page it but all the images etc. linked with a named address can't be loaded.
It seems like IE isn't getting the IP addresses resolved by DNS.
What is weirder is that www.google.com does load, but with a similar issue with images etc.
Anyone have any ideas?

P.S. !NetSurf works fine in RiscOS so I think my network/router setup is OK even though the RiscPC is plugged into a WiFi extender.

[SKS1]

Is it any better if you got directly to https://www.bbc.co.uk ? Archaic IE might not expect redirection from http to https?

[rodders]

Pretty sure I tried that without success.

[acorndave]

Long time since I played around with W95.

Obviously the version of IE that comes with it will be pretty old. But I guess it should still work in a basic sort of a way. I seem to think there are some network settings in IE itself, but I might be misremembering.

Internet properties / Lan settings or similar. Think you can set it to automatic or provide LAN details etc. Worth having a poke around anyway if you haven't already

[SKS1]

"I quickly ran into this fatal issue on other sites: these days, pretty much all websites are secured with HTTPS, and the underlying protocol, SSL, has evolved quite a bit since the late 90s. This meant that none of the HTTPS links I tried in IE4 worked. The problem is that all the cipher suites that old browsers are compatible with are now deprecated, because they’re insecure. This manifests as generic connection errors in IE4."

[From https://medium.com/@snoffeecob/bringing ... d030b75643]

[roland]

I think the best way to use IE4 is to use a proxy server. You connect to the proxy with http and the proxy connects to the destination server over https. Or use something like I did here.

You will probably run into other problems as well, like modern versions of JavaScript used on websites.

[sweh]

Yeah, Win95 is pretty much unrecoverable when it needs to talk to modern TLS stacks. A traditional proxy is limited 'cos if the app is proxy aware and does CONNECT then the TLS layer is still done between app and server. In limited use cases where you can specify the URL you can force a proxy, but...

More generally you'd need a transparent TLS intercepting proxy (and add the proxy root CA as a trusted CA). That can break the session, so you can be weak between you and the proxy, but strong between the proxy and the server.

That's not a simple setup, though.

(WinXP _can_ be kludged....)

[qUE]

Definitely likely an issue with TLS support with IE. The latest browser which should work with 9X without patching with KernelEx is roytam's mod of Retrozilla. It enables support of TLS 1.2, but it's days are numbered since the internet is moving to TLS 1.3 which the OpenSSL libs haven't been ported to 9x for whatever reason.

See here for Retrozilla links; https://msfn.org/board/topic/174987-ret ... 2-released

Other than that, like what's been mentioned here with MITM Proxies, there is likely pages on MSFN about it.

[rodders]

Thanks for the advice guys. Not really sure what I'd do with it anyway. Just wanted to see it working.

[davehill]

Finally got my 486 card in my RiscPC to run Win95 - pretty straightforward when you do it right
However, setting up networking is driving me to distraction, the PCPro3 User Guide doesn't have much to say.
I finally got the adapter set up by letting Windows find it and setting the Interrupt to 12 (as configured in !PCConfig which also specifies options -deh1 -

How did you get !PCConfig to show the networking config? Netlinks is greyed out for me. I have an iCubed EtherLAN 600 and it works fine in RISCOS. Just wondering why its greyed out, or if its the wrong NIC for PCPro3

[IanJeffray]

How did you get !PCConfig to show the networking config? Netlinks is greyed out for me. I have an iCubed EtherLAN 600 and it works fine in RISCOS. Just wondering why its greyed out, or if its the wrong NIC for PCPro3

Did you *configure EHVirtual on ?
You need to do this so that RISC OS has one logical interface, and the PC card can prod the other interface.

[davehill]

Did you *configure EHVirtual on ?
You need to do this so that RISC OS has one logical interface, and the PC card can prod the other interface.

I tried that, but it didn't work. I am wondering if I am missing some files from the PCBits directory. I found !PC on the internet somewhere, but can't confirm what should be in there.

This is what I see. I presume I should be able to click NetLinks and do some kind of configuration. I installed Windows 95 in !PC, but it doesn't show any NICs under System.

[davehill]

Did you *configure EHVirtual on ?
You need to do this so that RISC OS has one logical interface, and the PC card can prod the other interface.

Figured it out!! Found this thread... viewtopic.php?t=20966 and it was as I thought, missing the NetLinks directory of PCBits. So I can now see NetLinks in !PCConfig. Will see if I can configure it in Windows now.

[IanJeffray]

missing the NetLinks directory of PCBits. So I can now see NetLinks in !PCConfig. Will see if I can configure it in Windows now.

Ah, well, yes, if you want to use the Network Links product you ... well ... need the Network Links product. I assumed that was kind of obvious, but perhaps if you expect that it was all provided together, you wouldn't be aware of that -- it was a separate product.