Basilisk II Windows port ethernet support

-----------------------------------------

Overview
--------

Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 and Windows 95 OSR2

are supported. Original Windows 95 may or may not work. The selected NDIS driver
name is saved to different preference entries for NT, Win2k and 9x platforms to
support multi-boot environments.

Installation (Windows 2000 Professional)

----------------------------------------
- Log in with administrator rights. After installation, user rights suffice.
- Open Network and Dial-up Connections in Control Panel.
- Click Local Area Connection.
- Click the File menu, and then click Properties, or click the Properties button.
- In the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box, click Install.
- Select "Protocol", and then click "Add"
- Click "Have disk".
- Browse to the folder where you unzipped files "B2Win2k.inf" and the
Windows 2000 version of the "B2ETHER.SYS" driver. Click OK.
- Select "Basilisk II Ethernet driver" from the list and click OK.
- Close the dialog. Wait until the binding analysis is complete,
- Reboot the computer (recommended).
- After reboot, select the desired network card in the Basilisk GUI
ethernet page.

Installation (Windows NT 4.0)

-----------------------------
- Log in with administrator rights. After installation, user rights suffice.
- Start Windows Control Panel and double-click the "Network" icon.
- Select the "Services" tab.
- Click "Add..", then "Have disk".
- Enter the full path of the directory where you unzipped
the files "B2ETHER.SYS" and "OEMSETUP.INF", and click OK.
- Select "Basilisk II Ethernet driver" from the list and click OK.
- Close the dialog. Wait until the binding analysis is complete,
and reboot when advised.
- After reboot, select the desired network card in the Basilisk GUI
ethernet page.

Installation (Windows 98)

-------------------------
- Start Windows Control Panel and double-click the "Network" icon.
- Click "Add..", then "Protocol", then "Have disk".
- Browse to the directory where you unzipped the files
"B2ETHER.INF" and "B2ETHER.VXD", and click OK.
- Select "Basilisk II Ethernet driver" from the list and click OK.
"Basilisk II Ethernet driver" should appear in the list.
If you get a message claiming that the "Specified location does not
contain information about your hardware", you already installed
it once. Remove it first if you need to reinstall, only one
instance is allowed. You may also try to temporarily move the two files
to the root folder of some drive.
- Close the dialog. Wait until the binding analysis is complete,
and reboot when advised. You may be prompted to insert Windows 98
installation CD to copy some NDIS support files. Most of them are
probably already present, if you are sure that they are you can
skip the file copying (except the B2ETHER.VXD file).
- After reboot, select the desired network card in the Basilisk GUI
ethernet page.

Installation (Windows 95)

-------------------------
- Tested on OSR2, behaviour on older versions is unknown. Installation is
the same as on Windows 98, except that Windows 95 is even more picky
about the folder where the installation files are. Try the root folder
of some drive, or even a floppy as a last resort.

GUI options
-----------
Select which NIC (network interface card) you want to bind to.
I have tested with one NIC setup only, multiple may or may not work.
I have no cable modems to test with, but if yours shows up
as a network card you may be able to use it.

Other options are probably fine by default.

If you want to run any Mac "sniffer" application (network analyzers)

that expects to see all packets on the wire, you need to enable the
promiscuous mode. On heavy traffic networks, this may result in packet
loss and slow operation of Basilisk II. Normally, stick with "Get
AppleTalk multicast packets".

By default, the hardware network card address is used (permanent

address) to identify self. You can try current MAC address too,
but normally these are the same. "MAC" in this context does not refer
to Macintosh, but Media Access Controller.

You can also specify a "fake" hardware address. It's a 12 digit hexadecimal
string with no space in between characters. The address must not conflict with
any real NIC on the network. This may allow you to connect to some AppleShare
servers running on the same computer. If you use this option, you need to
specify the promiscuous mode as well. However, this option may break MacTCP traffic
to other Basilisk II computers, but not to other NT computers on the network.

The behaviour of the address faking is going to change in the future.

TCP over ethernet

-----------------
MacTCP should work if you have Mac ethernet extensions
installed and enabled. You can even connect to other TCP/IP
server software running on the same machine. Home users with
a network card/ISDN combo may want to set up a proxy server to
access the internet.

OpenTransport works with 68030 or 68040 CPU.

AppleShare
----------
You should be able to connect to remote AppleShare file
servers, share your files and print. Depending on the MacOS
version, you may need to install EtherTalk. Select it in the
Network control panel.

Switching from LocalTalk to EtherTalk may be tricky and

tends to crash. This is not due to any problems in the
ethernet support, but LocalTalk is not supported by
Basilisk II and even when switching away from the LocalTalk,
the Mac tries to access it.

To minimize the chance of the crash, you may want to

try some of the following (some items may not be relevant):

- Disable the extensions "Serial", "Serial port arbitrator" and

"Serial tool".
- Make sure there is no desktop printers, or anything
else that could directly or indirectly try to access
LocalTalk.
- Start with extensions disabled (but sometimes the
EtherTalk selection is not saved).
- Do not start other apps before switching to ethertalk
- Disable file sharing

You should already know everything after that (how to use

Chooser, sharing setup, tcp/ip etc). Please do not send me
questions about general Macintosh networking, they will be
ignored.

If you are able to use OpenTransport with 68030 or 68040 CPU option
and have a 1 MB ROM, you can use AppleShare too. OpenTransport seems
to work much more reliably than classic networking.

File servers and file sharing with workstations

-----------------------------------------------
Make sure that you have compatible versions of AppleShare.
No known problems, except that under extremely heavy network
loads (two Basilisks writing cocurrently to each other disks as
fast as possible) the connections may sometimes get broken.

Shared printers
---------------
No known problems.

On performance
--------------
The networking code has some performance hit. It is noticeable on
low-end computers only, on PII300 and better it can hardly be
detected.

You should not run network intensive programs at the same time
under Basilisk II and Windows on the same machine. They share
the same network card and both parties must do some work to
determine whether packets are meant for them or not.
After switching from LocalTalk to EtherTalk, it may take
a short while before AppleShare servers and printers appear
in Chooser. If you don't want to wait, switch AppleTalk off
and then on again.

Technical TODO
--------------
There is no need to lift the echo packets to the application
level. Downstream people should really take care of them.

Some experiments would be needed to find out sufficient

pending read pool size.

Somebody should run the MS hardware stress suite against this.

Windows 98 version does not use i/o completion callbacks

but a different technique that involves waiting on overlapped
file handles. Although there is always a pool of 10 pending reads,
this is still vulnerable and should be changed.

The Windows 98 version sometimes shows a black screen a few seconds

when shutting down Basilisk II. This is due to an attempt to close
down pending reads gracefully; if it does not succeed in 3 seconds,
the threads are killed. Maybe it would be in order to come up with
a better mechanism.

Known problems
--------------
There has been some problems with AppleTalk zone list behaving rather oddly.

D.I.Y
-----
If the network drivers do not work for you, you are encouraged to
download a copy of the source code distribution and debug it. You need
Visual Studio 5 or 6 and MASM. The DDK, either Win98, NT4 or Win2000 version,
is needed to build the drivers. DDK's are available at Microsoft web site.

--
Lauri