Networking for dummies

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Revision as of 15:03, 31 July 2014 by Wildwest (talk | contribs)
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The only current way to access the internet in KolibriOS is through an ethernet connection. Drivers are available for various types of ethernet cards. To access the internet, you'll need to connect the ethernet card of your KolibriOS PC to a network that has a gateway to the internet. (A router). Setups that use PPP on the client computer (straight connection to some ADSL modems for example) are not possible yet.

Netcfg

Netcfg is the name of the program that's responsible for loading the network drivers that are needed on your system.
Only ethernet devices are supported so far.

When opening the program, you will presented with a list of network devices that are deteced in your computer.
Netcfg.png
It's possible to load the network driver for an interface by selecting in, and pressing the 'start device' button that will appear in the left upper corner of the program.

In normal circumstances however, all drivers will already be loaded, because netcfg is executed silently at booting time.
In autorun.dat (open with a text editor) there is a list of programs that are loaded at booting time, in this list you'll find 'netcfg A'.
The parameter 'A' makes netcfg load all drivers and then exit immediately.

Netstat

Netstat gives an overview of the active network devices, and the various protocols running on them.
After loading netstat, you'll be looking at the 'physical' tab of the 'loopback' device.
Loopback.png
Something more interesting/familiar might be the IPv4 tab of one of the ethernet devices.
Ipv4.png
Here you can see the current IPv4 settings of this device (example from virtualbox), editing is unfortunately not yet possible in this program.

ZeroConf

ZeroConf is a program that will try to contact the DHCP server on your network to get the IPv4 settings needed for your machine. If no such server is found on your network, zeroconfig will by default choose a link-local IPv4 address. You will not be able to browse the web with such an address. Another possibility is to config IPv4 settings manually, for this you need to open zeroconf.ini with a text editor and edit the settings there. After saving the file, just run zeroconfig again, or reboot the system.
This program is also run automatically at booting time from autorun.dat