INF: Source Level Routing and OpenAdapter Issues

ID Number: Q60845

2.00 2.10

OS/2

Summary:

The following are questions and answers about LAN Manager source level

routing and OpenAdapter issues:

1. Q. What does it mean when an NDIS driver says it supports source

routing? Does this mean the NDIS driver keeps a table of routing

information for subsequent use, or does it mean that the

token-ring chipset the NDIS driver talks to keeps the routing

information? Or, does this signal JETBEUI that the data it is

receiving from the NDIS driver may have source routing

information? This would mean that when JETBEUI receives the

data, it has to know how to determine whether the source routing

field exists, and determine the length of the source routing

field in order to determine where the real data in the frame

begins.

A. If IBM source routing is used (bit 9 in MACservice specific

characteristics), it is the protocol module's responsibility to

encode and interpret appropriate source routing information.

This bit merely implies that the device is capable of sending

packets with the source routing bit set in the source address so

that a protocol may recognize such a packet.

2. Q. If a Token-ring NDIS driver says it supports the open adapter,

is it JETBEUI's responsibility to call OpenAdapter to get onto

the ring? Or should the NDIS driver open the adapter itself once

the NDIS driver has initialized the adapter?

A. If OpenAdapter (bit 11) is set, the protocol driver must ensure

that the adapter is open. The open status of an adapter can be

determined by examining bit 4 of the MAC status in the

MAC-specific status table. If the adapter is not open, the

protocol must issue an OpenAdapterRequest (normally during

bind-time processing).