Until recently several customers have an industrial machine that boots DOS. I think the oldest effort we deal with is Win XP now. I do have a C>64 at home ...

In a world that requires security audits etc here's some notes that might help:

Scenarios: You have a device that only talks NetBIOS or even NetBEUI for file sharing. You need to get files to and from it and your CAD workstations run Windows 11 and anything less than SMB 3, with signing and sealing and all that jazz is laughable.

... Devices requiring ftp, telnet, serial over carrier pidgeon

Solution options:

Networking: The first job is to segregate your industrial gear from your general network and you might want to create two or more industrial gear and internet of things type networks with differing access policies. Start with one for now, you can improve it later.

You use 801.1Q VLANS logically or physically (why the hell did I want to write literally?) separate via separate switches.

Please do not skimp on this step. Buy a network bod to sort it out or put your IT bod on a course or hopefully they will have labbed this up at home already!

Comms: Samba is bloody wonderful and speaks everything that MS has ever done and deprecated. Even Samba does need to be asked to start speaking some of those dialects again but it will.

Put a Linux (other Unices are available) box on the same VLAN as your machines. You will need to set quite a few options relating to the minimum version for its server version. When talking to the machines, Samba is the server and when talking to your file server, Samba is the client.

Create a data share on a Windows box on the corp LAN. For example it might be on a file server for multiple access or just a single CAD PC.

Get the Samba box to mount that share to itself at say /srv/data_share_mc1

Now get the Samba box to create a share from /srv/data_share_mc1 which it calls DAT_MC1 (8.3 chars for NetBIOS)

With luck, you should be able to map DAT_MC1 on your machine.

Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?