Frequently Asked Questions; What Is A Packet Driver And How Do I Use It - Bay Networks NauticaRS Reference Manual

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Packet Driver and How Do I Use It?

117237-E Rev.00
The following section details some of the frequently asked
questions, specific to the Nautica upgrade, and how they are
resolved.
A packet driver provides a software interface between a PC's
network card and the programs that need to send and receive
packets of data on the LAN. These programs could be protocol
stacks such as TCP/IP, or they could be programs that need a
more direct link level interface to the network, such as the Nautica
software load programs
Packet drivers are available for particular models of network card
and for more generic network card interfaces such as ODI
(Novell) or NDIS (Microsoft).
Packet drivers can be divided into MS-DOS terminate and stay
resident programs (TSRs) and Windows device drivers. Some
people think that Windows device drivers are more convenient to
use, while others would rather boot their PCs into DOS mode to
use packet drivers to avoid changing their Windows networking
configuration. Either way, you must load the packet driver before
trying to run a program that needs the packet driver's services.
The packet driver and the programs that use its services
communicate by means of a mechanism known as a software
interrupt. The interrupt acts as a mailbox through which
messages are passed. The packet driver is instructed as to which
software interrupt to use, by means of a configuration file or by a
command line parameter when it is loaded. Client programs may
use a similar mechanism. In the case of the Nautica software load
programs, the default software interrupt used is 0x66. This can be
overridden with the -i[interrupt] command line parameter, where
interrupt is a hexadecimal number. For example:
c:> clamload clam.bay -i69
Upgrading from NauticaRS 3.5R
; marload and isdnprog.
CLAMLOAD
Appendix B-15