Mail Archives: opendos/1997/06/09/20:10:51
On Mon, 09 Jun 1997 18:09:53 -0400 Chris Linstid <clinstid AT ptd DOT net>
writes:
>yeep wrote:
>>
>> > (2) what is PROTMAN? On the Novell site, in the technical help
>> > notes, they list protman.exe(?) as needing to be loaded in
>> > config.sys. However, my OpenDos distribution did not come
>> > with any such program. Moreover, my search inside of
>> > DosBook does not turn up any mention of protman. (Yet, it
>> > DOES mention odinsup, as if it should be able to load
>> > without anything such as protman, or even any changes to
>> > config.sys.)
>>
>> Protman is something that comes with M$-Windows.
>> I don't know exactly what it is.
>>
>> Yeep
>Protman sounds like a network protocol manager...guess it looks to see
>what is already loaded network wise...I guess you probably figured
>that much out already though.
>
Here's some more, from a Quarterdeck technical bulletin:
Common to all NDIS network software is a program called PROTMAN.
While
Microsoft calls this program PROTMAN.DOS, Tiara and Sitka call it
10PROT.DOS,
and DEC calls it PROTMAN.SYS. They are all the same program. You can
tell
because device drivers have an internal name which they store beginning
at
byte 0Ah and all of these programs have the same internal name:
PROTMAN$.
PROTMAN is short for "protocol manager". It provides services to
network
drivers that load after it to reconcile the protocol used by the network
card
driver and network software.
PROTMAN does a curious thing: It writes some code and data into
memory
at about 90K beneath the top of the region into which PROTMAN loads.
Later
network drivers that use the services of PROTMAN while they load are
redirected to use the code and data in this area. Apparently PROTMAN'S
authors expected it to load into conventional memory, where 90K from the
top
of conventional memory is 550K from the bottom of memory on a system with
640K
conventional memory.
When you load it high you may well load it into a region not large
enough
to accommodate this stuff at 90K beneath the top of memory. For example,
if
you load it into B000-B7FF, 90K beneath the top of memory is in the video
card's graphics address space. This causes the loading of subsequent
network
programs that use the services of PROTMAN to fail when it points them
into the
video card's memory when they try to use PROTMAN's services. If you load
PROTMAN into a region 90K large, PROTMAN will overwrite the code it loads
low
with this stuff it loads into 90K beneath the top of its region.
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