nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) (12/13/89)
Release 5.x of the Clarkson PC packet drivers is now (finally!) available. The packet drivers hide the differences between PC Ethernet cards, and also allow multiple (different) protocol stacks to coexist, most notably Novell and TCP/IP. Many bugs have been fixed. Please upgrade, as previous versions are known to be buggy. Rather than include the entire read.me file here, I'll just include the what's new section. Following it is the howtoget.it file. Changes from version 4.0 to 5.0 of the drivers: Summary: New: 3c505, ne1000, ni9210, ibmtoken. Bugs fixed: all drivers. Krishnan Gopalan and Gregg Stefancik wrote a packet driver for the 3c505. Brian Fisher wrote an "Ethernet" packet driver for the IBM Token Ring Adapter. Eric Henderson wrote a packet driver for Novell's NE1000. Russell Nelson modified ni5210 to be a ni9210 driver. This entailed some changes in 82586.asm. Russell Nelson wrote pktmode, a utility to set the receive mode. Russell Nelson wrote pktaddr, a utility to set the Ethernet address. Russell Nelson wrote pktall, a utility to help debug packet reception. Trace.com is a little bit more helpful about how to run it. Vance Morrison added starlan support to the wd8003e driver. Eric Henderson improved it. Deborah Swanberg noticed that the 3c503 driver didn't timeout properly if there was a failure to complete a transmit. The set_address routine in the device dependent files now returns the address length as it should have. Head.asm now keeps a copy of the hardware address set by set_address. This is used by f_get_address to return the current address. The device dependent get_address routine always returns the PROM address. The set_rcv_mode routine didn't work. Not at all. The access_type routine returns more appropriate errors. The f_get_address routine wasn't passing the right address length to get_address. Tail.asm now checks for extra parameters on the end of the line. Dan Lanciani added changes to ni5210 version 4.2 to increase reliability. It works for him. Unfortunately, I have had reports from other people that it breaks Novell. So, these changes are in "if DAN" conditional assembly. If your Novell connection gets dropped, try reassembling ni5210 after setting "DAN equ 0" in 82586.asm Packet drivers for the NE2000 and UB NIC PC/2 are in the works, but don't hold your breath. A packet driver for the Xircom pocket Ethernet adapter is undergoing testing. Jan Engvald found and fixed a bug in the wd8003e memory presence check. The howtoget.it file follows: The Clarkson packet driver collection Availability The Clarkson collection of packet drivers is available by FTP, by archive-server, Fido file request, and by modem. They come in two flavors -- executables only (drivers.arc), and source+executables (driverss.arc). All of the following instructions apply to both drivers.arc and driverss.arc. FTP: sun.soe.clarkson.edu:/pub/ka9q/drivers.arc grape.ecs.clarkson.edu:/e/tcpip/drivers.arc Archive-server: Send mail to archive-server@sun.soe.clarkson.edu and put the following command as the body of your message: help This will send you a help message. Reading this help message will tell you how to fetch the packet drivers. Modem: Call the Clarkson Heath User's Group's BBS: (315)268-6667, 8N1, 1200/2400 Baud, 24 hours. Change to file area 24 and download drivers.arc. Opus: 260/360 in the Nodelist. Drivers.arc is file requestable. -- --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu]) Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee. A recession now appears more than 2 years away -- John D. Mathon, 4 Oct 1989. I think killing is value-neutral in and of itself. -- Gary Strand, 8 Nov 1989.