mshiels@tmsoft.uucp (Michael A. Shiels) (07/11/90)
Do your products hook into PROTMAN$ (Protocol Manager)?
Do they provide an upper layer that looks like NETBIOS? Or vendor proprietary
interface?
IE: PROTMAN$
^
|--------------+
V V
IP$ ARP$
|
|--------+
V V
TCP$ UDP$
Would be how I envision the protocols hooking together under PROTMAN$.
What about providing an uppoer layer that looked like NETBIOS? Would allow
lots of flexible programming interfaces to be written since NETBIOS is
integrated right into OS/2 and DOS now (at least for the LAN environment)jbvb@VAX.FTP.COM ("James B. Van Bokkelen") (07/14/90)
>Do your products hook into PROTMAN$ (Protocol Manager)? All of the OS/2 TCP/IP products (except for a few that are built around 'smart' network interfaces with on-board TCP/IPs) use the NDIS specification to talk to a separate MAC-layer driver. Ours and Essex Sytems' support 802.5 and Ethernet via NDIS, and SLIP directly (I don't know of any serial line NDIS drivers). IBM supports at least Ether and 802.5. I assume that both 3Com/HP and Excelan support Ether, but I can't say about 802.5. >Do they provide an upper layer that looks like NETBIOS? Or vendor proprietary >interface? 3Com/HP and Excelan both provide an RFC 1001/1002 NETBIOS upper layer for LAN Manager. At the moment IBM, Essex and FTP Software don't. I know we're working on one, but I don't have a schedule. All the products use sockets for standard TCP/IP applications they may supply (like Telnet, Rlogin, FTP etc.), or for programs you build yourself. Presently you have to re-link to change vendors, but several people have talked about a "standard sockets DLL" that would avoid that. Nobody has designed it yet. >What about providing an uppoer layer that looked like NETBIOS? Would allow >lots of flexible programming interfaces to be written since NETBIOS is >integrated right into OS/2 and DOS now (at least for the LAN environment) The problem is that NETBIOS's flat 16-byte namespace doesn't map well to things like IP host/port tuples, or OSI NSAPs. You'd have to extend NETBIOS to work below the session layer, and apparently none of us love the critter sufficiently... James B. VanBokkelen 26 Princess St., Wakefield, MA 01880 FTP Software Inc. voice: (617) 246-0900 fax: (617) 246-0901