dzoey@terminus.umd.edu (Joe Herman) (12/07/90)
I want to thank everyone for helping me configure TCP/IP under ethernet for OS/2. It took about a week to figure out with much help from the net and a lot of help from IBM Raleigh. I will summarize how the configuration finally happened. Here's how to do it in brief. 1) Install the cards. If you are using an ethernet and a token ring card, the token ring card *must* be the alternate (or card 1) card. This means changing the card setup with the installation diskette. 2) Reinstall communications manager. You do this by putting disk 6 of the OS/2 E.E. installation diskettes into drive A and typing 'reinst'. Reinstall it for a clean copy of the configuration file (ACSCFGUS) for U.S. sites. After reinstalling, make a copy of the ACSCFGUS config file and go into communications manager (startcm.cmd) and modify the LAN parameters in the copy. There are detailed instructions in the TCP/IP installation guide as to what are suitable numbers. Make sure that the ethernet is adapter 0 and the token ring is adapter 1. Save this configuration file. Reinstall communications manager *again*, except that when it asks you for a directory for the configuration files, give it the c:\cmlib directory. Select the name of the configuration file you just created. This will insure the proper drivers are installed. To the sufficiently prepared, the first reinstallation of the base communications manager configuration file is optional. I had trashed mine by accident. 3) Install TCP/IP by using the ICAT program. Greyed selections mean optional, not available. If you wish you can also configure TCP/IP at this point. 4) Install IBMLAN requester. Install IBMLAN server. IBMLAN can run on only one of the cards. I needed to have it run on token ring so I had to modify the IBMLAN.INI (in c:\ibmlan) to use adapter 1 instead of adapter 0. You do this by changing the line that says NET1 = netbios$,[01],.... Select 0 or 1 for your primary or alternate adapter. For IBMLAN server you'll need to go back into communications manager again (selecting your configuration file) and modify the netbios parameters for the card you're using. The default number of sessions is (I believe) 8. Change this to 40 and change the next three entries to 40 also. 5) Reboot. Everything should come up okay (though you'll need to do a lot of adminstration for the LAN server, but that's another topic). If there are configuration erros, the file C:\CMLIB\ACSLAN.LOG contains some good information. The above should get you going. The following is some problems I ran into that you can avoid. Pitfalls and Avoidance: 1) I had almost no documentation. The IBM TCP/IP for OS/2 docs were good as far as they went. They told you how to configure fairly easily. In the course of this project I've found that IBM has published two or three network configuration manuals for OS/2. I can give people manual numbers if they send me mail. GET DOCUMENTATION. 2) No where is it mentioned that you have to re-install communications manager when you put a new type of board in. This loads in the support files needed. Apparently it's more than just copying files from (in my case) the 3COM OS/2 directory on the floppy that comes with the board. I did this and things still didn't work. 3) The ethernet adapter must be the primary adapter. 4) Make sure you select DIX ethernet 2.0 when in comms mgr for ethernet. Otherwise you'll put out 802.3 over ethernet and no one will talk to you except for HP who made a similar mistake earlier. 5) This one is supremely weird. When I installed TCP/IP on the configuration panel that dealt with LAN0 (ethernet) I turned off snap and the all routes broadcast because they applied to 802.3 and token ring respectively, and I was running ethernet. You know what the machine put out onto the ethernet? IP encapsulated in SNA (packet type 805D). I kid you not. Turning snap back on gives you IP over ethernet. The really weird part was it was still understanding RIP packets in ethernet format. It would just always transmit encapsulated IP. Very, very weird. 6) Make sure you know what kind of token ring card you have. Is it a token ring II /A a token ring 16/4 /A? We had been hoping to use the OS/2 machine to replace our dedicated DOS based router (MD-DOSIP) that routed between ethernets and a token ring. This would free up the old router machine to be used for something else. However, TCP/IP for OS/2 can only support 2 network cards, so we stick with our current router. This is apparently a limitation of the communications manager. The hardest part of all of this configuration was dealing with the communications manager. I really hope it gets a facelift for OS/2 2.0. I found the TCP/IP installation program ICAT to be easy to use and fairly friendly. Certainly miles ahead of communications manager. I didn't like the greyed selections for optional fields because I'm used to greyed fields meaning unselectable. Maybe the UI paradigm (see and you thought there wasn't a use for that word) is different for OS/2. The IP in SNA was sort of bizzare and a not particularly well documented side effect. In general, getting this puppy up and running as been a configuration hell. I couldn't have done it without the help and support of Raleigh and the people on the net. Thanks again. Joe Herman -- "Everything is wonderful until you know something about it."