OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Hardware => Topic started by: Marc Galloway on October 20, 2025, 03:49:39 am

Title: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 20, 2025, 03:49:39 am
** I have switched out the 3Com card for a Xircom to continue troubleshooting **

I'm needing help if anyone has any suggestions. I have a Thinkpad 600e with OS/2 Warp 3 Connect installed. I'm having trouble getting the PCMCIA 3Com EtherLink III 3C589D card working. When booting up I get a error saying interface does not exist. Here are the steps I have taken with some pictures:


1. Installed PC Card Director for OS/2 version 4.12 - https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad-Drivers/download.lenovo.com/lenovo/content/ddfm/600e.html (https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad-Drivers/download.lenovo.com/lenovo/content/ddfm/600e.html)
2. Installed 3COM 3C589 Etherlink III PCMCIA ethernet card NDIS driver https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/network/3com/589os2.zip (https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/network/3com/589os2.zip)
3. Configured TCP/IP and NETBUI



Title: Re: PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 20, 2025, 03:54:30 am
Rest of the pictures
Title: Re: PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Lars on October 20, 2025, 01:25:53 pm
Can you post your setup.cmd and also protocol.ini ?

The error does not sound as if this is HW or driver related. It rather sounds like TCP/IP not being set up correctly.

By the way: you might also consider applying the patch to the NDIS driver:
https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/network/3com/3c589patch.zip

That might not strictly be necessary on your system but it surely won't hurt either. In addition, it will make the "3net_log.exe" utility work.

Finally, look here, it is about Warp 4 but since you are using Warp 3, it might apply nonetheless:
https://www.os2world.com/olderforum/OS2World%20Ultraboard/www.os2world.com/cgi-bin/ultraboard/UltraBoardea6e.html?action=Print&BID=62&TID=1518&SID=
Title: Re: PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 21, 2025, 12:11:25 am
Can you post your setup.cmd and also protocol.ini ?

The error does not sound as if this is HW or driver related. It rather sounds like TCP/IP not being set up correctly.

By the way: you might also consider applying the patch to the NDIS driver:
https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/network/3com/3c589patch.zip

That might not strictly be necessary on your system but it surely won't hurt either. In addition, it will make the "3net_log.exe" utility work.

Finally, look here, it is about Warp 4 but since you are using Warp 3, it might apply nonetheless:
https://www.os2world.com/olderforum/OS2World%20Ultraboard/www.os2world.com/cgi-bin/ultraboard/UltraBoardea6e.html?action=Print&BID=62&TID=1518&SID=

Hi Lars, I swapped out the 3Com for a Xircom CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps (PS-CE2-10) which I have made further progress with than I have had with the 3Com. Since this card uses the pointed driver from my understanding I configured socket services to exclude slot 1. On boot-up I see some link activity but once fully into the WPS I get no activity on adapter lights or ping response. The adapter is picking IRQ and Memory address. I have tried a few different IRQs to see if that made any difference but get the same result. I have not tried to manually set Memory address. I have uploaded the requested information. 
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: RTAN on October 22, 2025, 09:17:27 pm
Hi Mark,

I know from experience that the 3C589D drivers are very buggy so you did the right thing to swap to a Xircom. I've got a few Xircom PCMCIA and CardBus cards and have never had problems with OS/2 Warp Connect with them.

They definitely don't need any additional PCMCIA card/socket drivers so you definitely want to make sure that all of that is uninstalled (disabled might not be enough).

Fire-up Selective Install and make sure PCMCIA support looks like the photo below. This is how I have it on my IBM ThinkPad 390X with a Xircom R2BE-100BTX and you can see it's pinging away quite merrily over TCP/IP.

Make sure too that you're using exactly the right driver for your Xircom PCMCIA or CardBus NIC. They have very similar model names but the right drivers aren't interchangable. For example the driver for an RBE won't work for an R2BE and vice versa.

Best,
Richard.
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Steven Levine on October 22, 2025, 11:11:31 pm
Many years ago I ran this card on a 770X.  I never could get the supposedly Card Services compliant CE2NDIS.OS2 driver to work so I used the point enabled XPSNDIS.OS2 driver.

I had other cards that worked with Card Services, so, unlike Richard, I ran with Card Services installed and setup Card Services to ignore the slot the Xircom was plugged into.

Here are my notes of the relevant CONFIG.SYS and PROTOCOL.INI entries

=== Overview ===

Using point-enabled in upper slot
Using IRQ 10

=== config.sys ===

REM Xircom uses IRQ 10
BASEDEV=RESERVE.SYS /IRQ:10 /MEM:D100,1000 /IO:320,20

REM Ignore upper slot - point enabled by Xircom
BASEDEV=IBM2SS14.SYS /IG0=1

REM -> Xircom PSCE2 9-11-97 v2.50
DEVICE=F:\IBMCOM\MACS\XPSNDIS.OS2

=== protocol.ini ===

[xpsos2_nif]

  DRIVERNAME = XIRCOM$
  IOADDRESS = 0x320
  INT = 10
  MEM = 0xD100
  NOEARLYRX
  VERBOSE

Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Lars on October 23, 2025, 10:11:20 am
Marc, you are saying that you are using XIRCOM card CE2 but you have installed driver CE3NDIS.OS2.

Are you sure that is the correct driver for your card ? On the other hand, I cannot find anywhere a driver CE2NDIS.OS2.

Anyway, the driver that Steve has suggested (the point enabled driver) is here:
https://archive.org/download/Xircom/Xircom.zip
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 23, 2025, 03:55:13 pm
Hi
On the other hand, I cannot find anywhere a driver CE2NDIS.OS2.
FYI: I found  a version  here (https://discmaster.textfiles.com/file/21553/20-NDrivers.zip/ce2204us.exe). (1994-10-05) and other here (https://discmaster.textfiles.com/file/30109/xtra0350-0359/xtra0351.tar/xtra0351/FIN-XIR2.ZIP) (1994-06-17)

Regards
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 24, 2025, 07:16:11 am
Sorry for the late reply, had some hardware issues on the Thinkpad. The original drive died so I replaced with a flash card. The Xircom dongle also seems to be defective. I installed on a Windows 98 laptop and got the drivers installed but was getting inconsistent pings at the slightest touch of the dongle.

@Martin - I downloaded the drivers you posted, need to get a dongle to test. Thank you.

Question: Do I need to install IBM Peer for OS/2 or IBM LAN Requester 4.0 to access shares on my NAS?

This bring me back to where I'm at now:

1. OS/2 Warp 3 installed
2. PCMCIA Support NOT installed (thank you Richard)
3. Installed Xircom REM56G-100 card -> cem56_100 drivers -  https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/laptop/cem56_100.zip (https://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/laptop/cem56_100.zip)
4. Configured card using Steven's settings
-Adapter memory address: D100
-Adapter IO address: 320
-Adapter IRQ: 10
-PC Card Slot: 2
-Emulate COM port 1 - 4: No
-Modem and Network share IRQ: Yes
-Enable verbose messages: Yes
5. Ping router address -> success
6. Ping www.os2world.com -> success

 
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Lars on October 24, 2025, 01:40:38 pm
Sorry for the late reply, had some hardware issues on the Thinkpad. The original drive died so I replaced with a flash card. The Xircom dongle also seems to be defective. I installed on a Windows 98 laptop and got the drivers installed but was getting inconsistent pings at the slightest touch of the dongle.

@Martin - I downloaded the drivers you posted, need to get a dongle to test. Thank you.

In case you want to retry your CE2 card with the driver set that Martin provided (say "FIN-XIR2.ZIP"):
the .NIF installation file would need a "brush up" to actually install the proper entries into the PROTOCOL.INI file.
Gleaning at the driver binary (CE2NDIS.OS2) and other .NIF files from Xircom, I think I would be able to provide you with a fixed .NIF file.

I can also see that even with the CE2NDIS.OS2 driver (and a corrected .NIF file), you will be able to ignore socket services and run the driver in "point enabled" mode which would allow you to always have PCMCIA support installed. If set up correctly via PROTOCOL.INI, the driver will just ignore/bypass the card services.

@Martin: would you see any issues in uploading these drivers to Hobbesarchive ? I am not the legal expert ...
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 24, 2025, 03:49:53 pm
Hello.
@Martin: would you see any issues in uploading these drivers to Hobbesarchive ? I am not the legal expert ...
Usually these kind of drivers were shared in BBS and Shareware CD-ROMs, like a lot of the content that is already in Hobbes. I haven't found anything on the readme files that restrict their distribution.

I had uploaded both under the same of "Xircom_CreditCardIIps_" with the respective reference to the original file name and the saying on the description that it includes CE2ODI.OS2 and CE2NDIS.OS2 so it can be searchable by those names too.

Regards
Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 24, 2025, 08:26:01 pm
Sorry for the late reply, had some hardware issues on the Thinkpad. The original drive died so I replaced with a flash card. The Xircom dongle also seems to be defective. I installed on a Windows 98 laptop and got the drivers installed but was getting inconsistent pings at the slightest touch of the dongle.

@Martin - I downloaded the drivers you posted, need to get a dongle to test. Thank you.

In case you want to retry your CE2 card with the driver set that Martin provided (say "FIN-XIR2.ZIP"):
the .NIF installation file would need a "brush up" to actually install the proper entries into the PROTOCOL.INI file.
Gleaning at the driver binary (CE2NDIS.OS2) and other .NIF files from Xircom, I think I would be able to provide you with a fixed .NIF file.

I can also see that even with the CE2NDIS.OS2 driver (and a corrected .NIF file), you will be able to ignore socket services and run the driver in "point enabled" mode which would allow you to always have PCMCIA support installed. If set up correctly via PROTOCOL.INI, the driver will just ignore/bypass the card services.

@Martin: would you see any issues in uploading these drivers to Hobbesarchive ? I am not the legal expert ...

If you would be willing to cleanup the .NIF file for install I would be more than happy to test and buy a cup coffee or make a donation for the work put in. I have a dongle on the way and should be here next week.
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: RTAN on October 25, 2025, 12:30:50 am
Mounting a drive to your NAS could be "problematic". I never got it to work against my QNAP but others here have had success. You'll need to install either IBM Peer for OS/2 or IBM LAN Requester for OS/2 in order to get the actual "net use" command which is what you need. And you'll need to crank down all the security on your NAS since Warp Connect only supports SMB1 and NTLMv1.

You may find it easier to simply connect via FTP - you should have command line FTP and PMFTP with Warp Connect.

Personally I tend to run FTPd on Warp Connect as a background service and "push" files onto my Warp Connect PC from my modern Windows desktop using FileZilla or equivalent. If you need instructions for that (where to find the settings) then just shout.
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Steven Levine on October 25, 2025, 12:42:23 am
Hi all,

I found a copy of ce2dr250.exe in my archives.  The v2.50 of the XPSNDIS driver. unfortunately the original URL has gone missing.

The archive is dated

  01-29-98  19:51         655,150      0  ce2dr250.exe

and is in arj format, so it's arj x -y to extract.

I've attached it here wrapped in a zip archive to the the forum software happy.


Title: Re: Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect Help Needed
Post by: Lars on October 25, 2025, 12:53:29 pm
Sorry for the late reply, had some hardware issues on the Thinkpad. The original drive died so I replaced with a flash card. The Xircom dongle also seems to be defective. I installed on a Windows 98 laptop and got the drivers installed but was getting inconsistent pings at the slightest touch of the dongle.

@Martin - I downloaded the drivers you posted, need to get a dongle to test. Thank you.

In case you want to retry your CE2 card with the driver set that Martin provided (say "FIN-XIR2.ZIP"):
the .NIF installation file would need a "brush up" to actually install the proper entries into the PROTOCOL.INI file.
Gleaning at the driver binary (CE2NDIS.OS2) and other .NIF files from Xircom, I think I would be able to provide you with a fixed .NIF file.

I can also see that even with the CE2NDIS.OS2 driver (and a corrected .NIF file), you will be able to ignore socket services and run the driver in "point enabled" mode which would allow you to always have PCMCIA support installed. If set up correctly via PROTOCOL.INI, the driver will just ignore/bypass the card services.

@Martin: would you see any issues in uploading these drivers to Hobbesarchive ? I am not the legal expert ...

If you would be willing to cleanup the .NIF file for install I would be more than happy to test and buy a cup coffee or make a donation for the work put in. I have a dongle on the way and should be here next week.
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Lars on October 26, 2025, 09:29:59 am
How to use this .NIF file:

1) get the latest driver for your Xircom CE2 card: https://hobbesarchive.com/Home/Download?path=/Hobbes/pub/new/Xircom_CreditCardIIps_2-04.zip

2) unzip the file into a temporary directory

3) change to the "NDIS" subdirectory of that temporary directory and copy/overwrite the CE2OS2.NIF file to that directory

4) run the "Network Adapters and Protocols" tool to install the driver by browsing to the "NDIS" subdirectory

A word of wisdom: The CE2NDIS.OS2 driver seems to support quite a few settings that I now added to the CE2OS2.NIF file so that they can be set and written to PROTOCOL.INI. Amongst those settings there are a couple of boolean settings with "Yes"/"No" keyword values for true/false. I think the Xircom device driver writers took a shortcut for boolean values in that they are only looking for the keyword instead of the proper keyword value. That said, it means that if you want to delete a boolean setting you will actually need to wipe the keyword value to an empty string instead of setting it to "No" so that it will be completely removed from PROTOCOL.INI. Additionally, it might be possible that for boolean settings, the driver will only expect to see the keyword instead of the keyword = value line. It might therefore need some experimentation.
Most importantly, the CE2NDIS.OS2 driver also supports point enabled operation by setting CARDSERVICES and SOCKETSERVICES both to "No". So you can still install PCMCIA card and socket services support and then ignore the slot where you inserted the Xircom card as suggested by Steve.

Another word of warning: per default the driver operates in "memory" mode and not "io" mode where memory means the drivers registers are memory mapped (addressable by a normal memory address instead of an io port). The address range accepted by the driver/the default address (expressed as a real mode segment value) might not be available on your system. If you have odd system behaviour, you might then try other values for the [MEM] keyword. The ArcaOS memory utility (or the QSINIT loader) can help you with the display of reserved memory regions on your system. I can help if that should become relevant/necessary.

Once you find out that the .NIF file works for you, let me know and I will rebundle the driver zip with this updated .NIF file and reupload to Hobbes.
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Marc Galloway on October 29, 2025, 04:57:25 pm
@RTAN - Great suggestion. I have FTP running on the NAS but do like the option of having the FTP server run on OS/2.

@LARS - Waiting on the dongle to arrive, eta is Friday. Once I get that I will follow the instructions you have posted and report back. Thank you for putting the time and work into this.

@Steven - Thank you for linking to the driver.
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Dave Yeo on October 29, 2025, 05:56:51 pm
Perhaps the best ftp daemon for OS/2 is available at ftp://ftp.pmoylan.org/FtpServer/index.html
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Marc Galloway on November 06, 2025, 04:26:22 am
@RTAN - Great suggestion. I have FTP running on the NAS but do like the option of having the FTP server run on OS/2.

@LARS - Waiting on the dongle to arrive, eta is Friday. Once I get that I will follow the instructions you have posted and report back. Thank you for putting the time and work into this.

@Steven - Thank you for linking to the driver.

Hey Lars, Just getting time to test this now. The URL you reference is not working. When I manually got to pub/new I see 3 choices that relate to the adapter.

1. Xircom_PerfSeries_2-50.zip (Xircom Performance Series Adapter 2.50 (1998-01-21)
2. Xircon_CardBusEth_1-25.zip (Xircom CardBus Ethernet 10/100 Adapter 1.25 (1997-09-23)
3. Xircon_CardBusEth_3-0.zip (Xircom CardBus Ethernet 10/100 Adapter 3.0 (2000-07-28)
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Lars on November 06, 2025, 06:57:22 am
The driver I was referring to is in pub/os2/system/drivers/network:

https://hobbesarchive.com/Home/Download?path=/Hobbes/pub/os2/system/drivers/network/Xircom_CreditCardIIps_2-04.zip
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Marc Galloway on November 06, 2025, 08:13:07 pm
Driver and NIF file worked perfect! Once installed I used the below settings.

1. Adapter memory address: D100
2. Adapter IO address: 320
3. Adapter IRQ: 10

Can I send a donation your way for the help?
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Lars on November 07, 2025, 03:20:20 pm
Thank you very much for your offer but that won`t be necessary.
Glad you got it working. Which means I can now update the existing package with the updated .NIF file.
By the way, could you attach your protocol.ini, just out of curiosity ?
Title: Re: [Solved] Xircom - PCMCIA Ethernet - Thinkpad - OS/2 Warp 3 Connect
Post by: Marc Galloway on November 08, 2025, 08:14:20 pm
Sure, no problem at all. Protocol.ini attached.