Questions And Answers; What Is A Packet Driver And How Do I Use It - Bay Networks Nautica 200 Reference Manual

Questions and Answers

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

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The following section details some of the common frequently
asked questions, and how they are resolved.
A packet driver provides a software interface between a PCs
network card and the programs which 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 which need a
more direct link level interface to the network, such as the
NAutica software load programs CLAMLOAD; MARLOAD and
ISDNPROG. 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 feel that Windows device drivers are more convenient to
use, while others would rather boot their PCs into DOS mode to
use packet drivers in order to avoid changing their Windows
networking configuration. Either way, you must load the packet
driver before trying to run a program which needs the packet
driver's services.
The packet driver and the programs which 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 told 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
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