Network Supervisor's Toolkit

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Text File | 1996-07-10 | 19KB | 385 lines

Number: ACK110189U2000 Subject: NetWare 286 v2.15c Corrections and Fixes Date: November, 1989 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GENERAL INFORMATION: CORRECTIONS AND FIXES The following are descriptions of problems in SFT and Advanced NetWare 286 v2.15 revisions A and B. Each of these problems has been corrected in the NetWare 286 2.15 rev. C maintenance release. Operating System Problems Corrected o If eight or more file servers existed on an internetwork using external bridges then it is possible to lose every eighth server in the router table. The symptom of this problem is a fully functional file server which some users cannot log into. When they attempted to log into that server they would receive the response "unknown file server." This is corrected o Copying files from a DOS partition to a NetWare partition on a non- dedicated file server in a 80386 machine would cause the error "ABEND: Invalid task state interrupt passed to kernel." This is fixed. o If the non-dedicated operating system size was greater than 512 KB, the system would crash with a General Protection Interrupt (GPI). The non-dedicated operating system would only load eight 64 KB segments. When an operating system exceeded this limit, the last 64 KB would not get loaded. The limit is increased to nine 64 KB segments (576 KB). This was as large as a non-dedicated operating system can be in order to reserve sufficient memory for DOS. o The error "ABEND: Bad block returned via rfree" would occur on large internetworks with a NACS installed because the NACS would send out a shortened packet. A normal packet can cross 8 bridges and is large enough to hold the information that each bridge adds to it. The short packet sent out by the NACS advertised itself as a packet which can cross 8 bridges. However, because it was short, the router information which should be added to the packet was over-writing information in memory after passing 5, or so, bridges. This packet would get propagated throughout the internetwork. The result was that many servers would ABEND. A check to make sure that the packet length was correct has been added. If the packet length is incorrect NetWare will discard it. o The error "ABEND: Invalid redirection index table" occurred after completion of a REMIRROR command on disk drives greater than 255 MB. This error no longer will occur as a result of large disk drives, but only when something truly has happened to the redirection index table. o When a power failure occurred, UPS monitoring would send out messages to users indicating that the file server would be brought down. The UPS monitoring feature then failed to down the file server. This feature now functions as advertised. Disk Mirroring Problems o Disk mirroring could not be accomplished in disk drives greater than 255 MB if the first volume size was defined to be less than the default 255 MB value. This was corrected. o A mirrored disk drive failure could bring down the entire channel under if disk mirroring was taking place on a single Disk- Coprocessor. This is now changed to shut down only the failed device instead of the whole channel. Removable Disk Drive Problems o Enabling directory caching on a removable hard disk drive would cause a GPI. This was fixed. o Multiple sequences of the MOUNT and DISMOUNT commands would eventually hang the server. The DISMOUNT command will now free allocated memory when used. o Multiple removable drives could not be mounted correctly; this has been corrected. NVER o If NVER was run on any 8088-based workstation, that workstation would hang. This includes IBM Model 25, PC, PC/XT, or any other IBM PC-compatible machine. 80286-and 80386-based machines did not have this problem. This was corrected. FCONSOLE o A console operator with Read, Open, and Search rights in a given directory could not see any files from within FCONSOLE. If the user was supervisor, or equivalent, this problem did not appear. This was changed. NINSTALL o Even parity on printers has not functioned correctly on NetWare versions 2.1 through 2.15. The problem has been corrected with the NINSTALL utility. Previous versions of NINSTALL placed incorrect printer information on the network disk when even parity was selected. Login Script MACHINE_NAME Variable o If the variable MACHINE_NAME was used in the login script and DOS 4.0 was used then the error "DOS 3.1 or greater was required" would occur. This was corrected. IPX.COM, NET2.COM, NET3.COM, NET4.COM o When attempting to rename a directory through filer, the error "file not found" would occur. This was fixed o When attempting to rename a file that another user had opened, the error "file not found" occurred. The error in 2.15 rev. C will be "accessed denied." SYSCON o If directories were created with names up to 14 characters, as allowed by the Macintosh, those directory names would be truncated to 8 characters when using the DOS DIR command. This utility has been updated to version 2.20d. SESSION o SESSION reported incorrect user login times. It will now properly report this information. NCOPY o When copying a Macintosh file with NCOPY from one area to another the Last Modified date was changed to the date the file was copied. Also changed were the Last Accessed and Date Created dates. This was seen from the Get Info screen on the Macintosh. NCOPY will no longer change any of those dates. External Bridges o The following error occurred on external bridges while initializing LAN A: "ABEND: Cannot find the load file." "Running Process: MUXPRC" BRIDGE.EXE was fixed. Printing o A printer configured for even parity did not work properly. This feature is now properly supported. NetBIOS o The default number of NetBIOS sessions available was 10 (without SHELL.CFG). The default number of active sessions was six. If more sessions were needed then an adapter reset was required. Without the SHELL.CFG file present, and by resetting the adapter, 10 sessions were available. If a SHELL.CFG file was present, and it contained the statement "NETBIOS SESSIONS=xx" where xx was the number of NetBIOS sessions, then through the adapter reset method, that number of sessions would be opened. This is changed such that now the number of NetBIOS sessions specified in the SHELL.CFG file are immediately active without requiring an adapter reset. o The number of local names per workstation has increased from 16 to 26. o The maximum number of NetBIOS session per workstation available has increased from 100 to 250. o The default number of sessions per workstation (without SHELL.CFG a statement) has increased from 10 to 32. o The minimum number of sessions and commands available is 4 per workstation. o A packet is now sent to the corresponding workstation when a session is aborted. That is, the partner in a session is now notified of the ABORT status. o The timeout on the HANG UP command is now 20 seconds. This includes the time used to complete pending session sends. This places an upper bound on the time to close a session. o Add Name now returns the appropriate IBM error when duplicate names are detected. o The Session Status command no longer affects the status of hung up or aborted sessions. o The broadcast datagram went to the first workstation found. The datagram would not be received by any other member of the group. Broadcast datagrams and datagrams to group names now get sent to every known cached network where members of datagram groups are located. To avoid confusion, broadcast datagrams are not globally broadcast. o The NetBIOS ABEND Free IPX Block Failed occurred in situations where it should not have. There are now only three different code paths that can cause this ABEND; all point to legitimate causes for the error. Disk Controller o The disk controller selected in NETGEN labelled "IBM AT Hard Disk Controller or Compatible" has been changed to read "Industry Standard (ISA or AT Compatible) Disk Controller." LAN Drivers o There are now two Token-Ring LAN drivers. One driver is the standard Token-Ring driver. The second is to be used in bridges where source routing is required. Either driver may be used in a 16 megabit ring or a 4 Mb ring. All nodes on a ring must be configured to run at the same speed. The previous Token-Ring driver did not allow applications to change the interrupt vector location in memory. The shell would place it back at the location where it was when the shell was loaded. The application would hang because it expected the interrupt vector to be elsewhere. Both of these Token-Ring drivers will now allow an application to relocate the interrupt vector location. NEW ENHANCEMENTS The following are descriptions of enhancements to SFT and Advanced NetWare 286 v2.15 revisions A and B. Each of these are included in the NetWare 286 2.15 rev. C release. SHELL.CFG o An enhancement has been added to place the IPX configuration into the SHELL.CFG file. The user may physically change the hardware configuration of the NIC without running SHGEN. This can be done by placing the statement CONFIG OPTION=n, where n is the configuration option number. o Interrupts 64h and 7Ah can be enabled or disabled in the SHELL.CFG file. The statements in the SHELL.CFG file are INT64=ON/OFF and INT7A=ON/0FF. The default for both is ON. o NetBIOS looks for two new parameters in the SHELL.CFG file. These new options are: NETBIOS INTERNET=ON/OFF (ON is the default) NETBIOS COMMANDS=n (where n is 4 to 250. 12 is the default) Setting the internet flag to OFF can be advantageous if NetBIOS is not expected to cross any bridges. The wait time can be significantly reduced. The number of commands needed may vary between applications. In most cases, the default is sufficient. However, if a NetBIOS error 22h should occur, you may consider increasing this parameter. Most applications will trap this error and simply retry if a NetBIOS command is unavailable. In this case, increasing the number of commands will improve application performance. Anyone needing to know specifics on this should contact the software application developer to find out how many commands they might require. o Under some conditions, it is possible for a machine to be too busy for IPX to respond to the shell. The workstation will hang as a result. Typically, this occurs in fast workstations (such as an IBM Model 80) when the local hard disk is being used. The machine will accept an IPX broadcast before a local disk process is complete. To resolve this a retry count is added between the shell and IPX. Password Encryption o Previous revisions of the 2.15 NetWare operating system had the ability to utilize encrypted passwords on the data bus. Now, utilities will encrypt passwords as well. The following is a list of utilities that have been enhanced. ATTACH.EXE CAPTURE.EXE FCONSOLE.EXE FILER.EXE LOGIN.EXE MAP.EXE NPRINT.EXE PCONSOLE.EXE PRINTDEF.EXE SESSION.EXE SETPASS.EXE SYSCON.EXE UPS Down Parameter o The maximum allowed time limit for UPS monitoring systems has increased from 30 minutes to 64800 minutes (45 days). USERDEF o In response to user requests, the USERDEF utility is added to simplify the creation of groups of users with accompanying rights and login scripts. USERDEF is a simple front-end interface to MAKEUSER. It was originally created for ELS NetWare, but has now been added to SFT and Advanced NetWare so that all network administrators will be able to make use of it. NETGEN and BRGEN o NETGEN and BRGEN have been changed to allow a maximum configuration of 250 communication buffers, rather than the 150 limit in previous versions. MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION The following are descriptions of information pertaining to NetWare 286 2.15 rev. C, but do not constitute fixes or enhancements. Passwords o If you are upgrading from NetWare version 2.1, 2.11, or 2.12 and have been using the required password length parameter, all user passwords will automatically expire to take advantage of increased security. Users must enter a new password to properly implement and improve their system security. o When your password expires, the system will ask you to change it. If you are not attached to multiple file servers then ignore the prompt to synchronize passwords. Do this by pressing <ENTER> to continue. Diskette Change o Ignore all references to the NetWare Keyboard Lock VAP and LAN_DRV_002 diskettes in the documentation. The LOCK.VAP program is no longer available. Novell and IBM drivers are contained on the LAN_DRV_001 diskette. All other drivers are available in the NetWare Supplemental Drivers kit. UPS o If you have an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) connected to your file server, do not disconnect the cable while the system is running. The system will identify a disconnection as a low- battery signal and down the file server. (X) This information was verified by Engineering. (X) This information was verified by Marketing.