Another Networking Problem

Windows 10 laptop using Intel Centrino Wireless

On the RPCemu networking guide it warns “You may not be able to bridge with a Wireless network, this all depends on various hardware support from your wireless network card.” But windows didn’t complain when setting up the bridge and internet is working fine using the bridge on the windows side.

RISC OS is transmitting over the bridge (Transmit Frames shows >4 billion frames), but not receiving (Receive Frames shows 0)
On the windows side the TAP adapter is not showing any bytes received, and says it sent 84 bytes.

The bridge shows plenty of traffic, but that is all to and from windows.

There are no errors in the RPCemu log, suggesting that https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/10/topics/9354 is not the problem.

I also use CiscoAnyconnect, but am not connected to a VPN now. I think I remember reading it can cause a problem, but I can’t avoid using it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Andrew

I also use CiscoAnyconnect, but am not connected to a VPN now. I think I remember reading it can cause a problem, but I can’t avoid using it.

Any ideas?

AnyConnect uses the TAP driver. All the evidence is that it never releases control.
Under XP the setup was unstable, when my XP machine was retired I found I could not get a working setup for RPCEmu networking. Sort of stable but stable non-working.

What does VRPC does that RPCEmu doesn’t/can’t?

What does VRPC does that RPCEmu doesn’t/can’t?

Using a sensible networking implementation? RPCEmu uses some kind of bridging technique for networking that requires installation of some 3rd party TAP driver which might or might not work with the Windows version you happen to use. VRPC directly forwards the networking stack calls to the Windows networking stack if I have understood things correctly.

This is not to be misunderstood as “those ROCEmu developers don’t know what they do”. Limited time, limited knowledge, different priorities. RPCEmu has a lot of development potential and it would probably be wrong to focus the limited resources on the networking, which is “good enough” for many users and not important for others. Personally, I would prioritize “multiple HostFS mounts”, since it would be much more valuable to me in many usage scenarios (e.g. using a shared disc on a NAS for emulation and native hardware) that could also be handled with better networking support.

Having recently spent the bulk of several days fruitlessly trying to set up networking on a RPCEmu 0.9.0/5.24 installation on a Win7 laptop I would be the last person to underestimate the difficulties involved (and I have successfully set up networking in the past on a W7 desktop using earlier versions of RPCEmu/RO). The problem is that successful setup relies on getting a whole series of settings right on both platforms and the test routines offer little or no feedback as to where the showstopper might be. I appreciate that RPCEmu is a labour of love for the developers and I applaud and am grateful for their continuing efforts. This does not change the fact that networking setup is in serious need of simplifying IMHO. As Steffen says, VRPC is basically plug and play: it is of course a piece of commercial software, which RPCEmu is not. And furthermore it won’t run RISC OS 5.

And furthermore it won’t run RISC OS 5.

I believe that Colin would be likely to say something about it needing “a bit of persuasion” rather than “won’t”

Steffen said

I would prioritize “multiple HostFS mounts”

Indeed. Annoyingly, I made precisely that change to RPCEmu many years ago and then lost my modification.

Was this changes to the RO side module – if so – can you do a compare with the standard ‘hostFS’ module?

It would be nice is there was a standard file in RO5.xx – which held a ‘Monitor’ cfg’s.

Perhaps ref’d by *configure monitor xx – xx being a number that could be saved in the CMOS file.

Have the emulator come with RO5.24 – in the ‘Roms’ Dir.

A standard way of going back and forth with the Main OS – is there a way of changing VRPC – ‘ALT-ENTER’ has side effects.

(And what does RPCEmu use – ‘CTRL-END’ sort of works one way.)

Druck worked on a program for RedSq – ‘VAnetPodule’ – Internet connection by passing SWI InternetCalls to WindSock.

Could this be made to work with RPCEmu?

Can’t seem to get it working with RedSq RO4.02 or 5.25 / Win7

Designed back in WinXP days – results passed on to VA team.

I have previously had networking working on a win 7 laptop, so it is doable. But it only worked through the Ethernet socket.

But it only worked through the Ethernet socket.

Indeed: that was my experience also, on the previous occasions when I managed to get things working. I thought I’d successfully duplicated the settings this time, but ‘ping -c 4 [router address]’ doggedly reports 100% packet loss, so I’ve given up for now. As it happens I’ve got VRPC-SA which is faster anyway, but I dislike being obliged to use a fifteen year old version of the OS which can’t load any file bigger than about 26MB.

Have you tried the RO5 Softload – you should get as far as Desktop – play around with edit Draw etc.

(RO4.xx to 6.xx seem to be softloaded on VA)

Long time ago – I 32bitted ‘HostFS + HostFSFiler’ from RedSq which – has worked on VRPC-DL for some time.

This means you can use HostFS system.
Run !boot etc.

Next was 32bitting the Internet module.

(I wonder if D Pillings ‘!Freshen’ up-dater software could be used to update the ‘Internet’ module)

The 32bit Internet can use RO5.xx Resolver.

And with a little modification – I can use RO4.02 or RO5.25 – as required.