As I understand it, the NLM can be used with NetWare 5.0, but it still relies on IPX. We have some customers that are interested in this new version of NetWare, so they can standardize on TCP/IP. We would like to stay with the NLM, as opposed to the NT Service or jLH engine, due to the relative performance level of these products. Are there any plans to make the NLM work with TCP/IP?

We have decided not to provide tcp/ip support for the native NLM. We are testing support of tcp/ip through Sockets on NT in the NT Service 2.0 beta and in jLH on Novell 5.0, NT, Solaris, and Linux (Red Hat 5.1).

Since there is no standard socket implementation available as part of DOS, we are unable to provide a version of the LH/TCPIP driver for Arev.

The support and certification of the Revelation NLM with IPX support assures that Arev users have an upgrade path.

Hereunder,is some internal discussion of the tcp/ip issue -

There are three possible ways that Advanced Revelation and OpenInsight can utilize TCP/IP:

1. The Operating System file services (int 21h) can be mapped to a Network File System; in these cases, the file I/O requests are handled by a VxD whose only job is to communicate the request to (and the result from) a "file server". If the work-station is communicating with that server via TCP/IP, then these I/O requests will be transmitted between the workstation and the server (and potentially routers etc. in between) using the TCP/IP protocol. This is all "behind the scenes" as the application (for example, the NPP using its "local mode") will not know or care that these requests are being transmitted via TCP/IP.

2. Some higher-level communications protocols are not transport protocols, and therefore require a lower-level protocol such as TCP/IP in order to communicate between two computers. In our case, we see this when using Microsoft's proprietary Named Pipes protocol to communicate between the NPP driver and the LH/NT Service. Again, this may use the TCP/IP protocol "behind the scenes" and the driver neither knows or cares.

3. There is a standard Application Programming Interface for TCP/IP called sockets. (TCP/IP itself is not a programming interface – it is just a data transfer specification.) Sockets are a fairly low-level means to use TCP/IP to communicate between (or among) processes and machines. We do use the sockets API (called WinSock) from the new LH/TCPIP driver in order to communicate with the new version of the LH/NT Service and the brand new jLH/Server. In this case, the driver does know that it is using the TCP/IP protocol … and it is using it as directly as is possible. The WinSock API used by the LH/TCPIP driver is available as a standard part of all contemporary versions of the Windows Operating Systems. Our Windows product, OpenInsight, required slight (but very deep) modifications in order to use the LH/TCPIP driver due to the architecture of the WinSock library. Unfortunately, we cannot easily port these changes back to previous versions, so the LH/TCPIP driver will only work with OpenInsight vers

ions 3.7 and later. Furthermore, since there is no standard socket implementation available as part of DOS, we are unable to provide a version of the LH/TCPIP driver for Arev.

Hope this helps

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