Message-ID: <000401c0ec40$d1acd1c0$11fea8c0@dell> From: "Ben A L Jemmett" To: References: <3 DOT 0 DOT 16 DOT 19810602212025 DOT 305f4288 AT tellus DOT swip DOT net> Subject: Re: networking with dos Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 14:03:15 +0100 Organization: Jemmett Glover Software Development MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com > Actually can someone (Matthias?) explain to me why running the DOS drivers > for PNW on the Win9x machine wouldn't work? It's quite complicated, I think, and the real reasons are buried within the Win9x networking layers. In fact, it's different on Win95 and 98 because MS made some changes to Win98's networking system. But this is how I understand it from discussions on Novell's Support fora: On Win95, you can install the PNW client before or during Win95 setup and then tell Win95 to use your existing Novell NetWare (or maybe ODI) stack. Then, during boot, the ODI stack and VLMs load as they do on DOS, and Windows will use the REDIR.VLM in the same way DOS does. I think it knows to use standard NetWare calls to do stuff like map/unmap drives and so forth. You can't, though, load the SERVER.EXE -- I think because once Windows enters protected mode, it's no longer able to access the disk properly since Windows took over the controller. Not sure on that reason though. With Win98, though, MS changed something. The 'pass calls down to the real-mode network' trick no longer works -- I don't think Win98 will use the real-mode redirector interface for anything. The VLMs may load (not sure -- Client32 for DOS has problems under MS-DOS 7.1 certainly), but Windows installs its own VREDIR.386 and networking system over the top of the existing stuff during boot. If you have the client installed before running SETUP, SETUP will comment out the STARTNET.BAT call in AUTOEXEC.BAT and provides you with the option to use your existing ODI driver, but no NetWare client. If you install the client during or after SETUP, Windows can't see it when you tell it to use the existing ODI installation. > If it doesn't work, was an attempt made using LoadTop=0 in msdos.sys? This > is added to solve problems with Novell Netware, and other programs. Well, according to the MSDN docs I can find, it loads COMMAND.COM and DRVSPACE.BIN into the top end of the 640Kb. I don't think the NetWare Client OSI stack makes any assumptions about the layout of memory (otherwise it might break on DR-DOS the same way compressed executables can do), but I'm not sure about the old monolithic IPX.COM and NETX.COM. NETX might be making an assumption about memory -- perhaps it's looking to find DOS's shell information but not finding it in the right place -- might more likely is that NetWare itself doesn't like having COMMAND.COM moved to the top end of memory, where it'll overwrite it with the NetWare SERVER.NLM and then not be able to exit to DOS properly or access the DOS partition; maybe it stops REMOVE DOS from working. Perhaps. Not sure. Regards, Ben A L Jemmett. (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)