LAN Adapter Capabilities Worksheet

Determining the Capabilities of LAN Adapters

2.  Find the module name of your LAN adapter.

Examine the PROTOCOL.INI file on the target machine.  Module names are specified in brackets at the beginning of PROTOCOL.INI sections.   A section belongs to a LAN adapter if there is no Bindings statement inside the section.

In the following fragment of PROTOCOL.INI, there are two LAN adapter sections.  The corresponding module names are IBMFEEO2_nif and IBMTRP_nif.

   [IBMFEEO2_nif]

     DriverName = IBMFE$
     SPEED = 100
     FORCEDUPLEX = 2

   [IBMTRP_nif]

     DriverName = IBMTRP$
     DataRate = "AUTO"
     EnableTxEofInt = "YES"
     MaxTransmits = 31
     MaxTxFrameSize = 4500
     MinRcvBuffs = 20
     RcvBuffSize = 2252
     FullDuplex = "YES"
     TxPriMax = 6
     TxPriThresh = 1
     LLCOnly = "NO"
     EOIDelay = 0
     LoopBack = "NO"

3.  Copy the UTILITY\BINDTREE.EXE from the Network Trace distribution to the target machine.  See the file list to identify where BINDTREE can be found in the Network Trace distribution.

4.  Run BINDTREE and capture its output to a text file.

The command:

BINDTREE.EXE > tmp

It will produce a report file named tmp. If necessary, a different name for the report file may be chosen.

5.  Edit or view the resulting report.

The report file has multiple sections, every section starts with a header, like this:

   **********************************************
   Up bound to: - - - - - - - -
   Module name: TCPIP_NIF
   **********************************************

   or like this:

   **********************************************
   Up bound to: NTRACE_ETH
   Module name: IBMFEEO2_NIF
   **********************************************

The Module name line contents correspond to your PROTOCOL.INI module name definitions.  You can ignore "Up bound to" line for the purpose of this analysis.

One module name can be seen in many sections, this is expected due to a "feature" in the NDIS protocol manager.  This is NOT a problem.

6.  Locate a section for the module name under consideration (e.g. IBMFEEO2_NIF).

The module names are not case-sensitive.

7.  In this section, find the table entitled "Service-specific Characteristics Table:".

Every section lists a few tables. A table is displayed first as a hex dump, then as interpreted data.  You have to focus on the second table, entitled "Service-specific Characteristics Table:".  All of the key LAN adapter characteristics are listed there.

8. Network type is listed under "MAC type name".

For Ethernet it's some combination of DIX and 802.3.
For Token-Ring it's always 802.5.

9. Link speed is listed under "Link speed (bits/sec)"

10. The most important characteristics are listed under "Services supported flags"

Look for the lines:

"promiscuous mode supported"           YES/NO
"statistics are always current in SST" YES/NO
"Loopback supported"                   YES/NO
"Multiple TransferDatas permitted"     YES/NO

11. The "promiscuous mode supported" characteristic is important for either protocol or service mode of operation of Network Trace. "YES" reports that the LAN hardware and MAC driver allow the copying of frames that are not directly addressed to this LAN adapter.

12. The "Loopback supported" characteristic is important for either protocol or service mode of operation of Network Trace.

For protocol mode, "YES" allows you (almost always) to trace outgoing frames.  This will usually be seen on Token-Ring cards and NOT on Ethernet cards.

For service mode, "NO" is preferred.  This is because "YES" means that the LAN hardware will duplicate outgoing frames in the trace.  Additional processing is necessary to remove these frames and it is recommended that this feature be disabled if possible (ONLY in SERVICE mode).

Normally, if your LAN adapter can do loopback, this characteristic is controllable through a setting in PROTOCOL.INI, like LoopBack = "NO" in the example above.

13. The "Multiple TransferDatas permitted" characteristic is important for protocol mode only.

If "YES", it allows for full frame trace, otherwise only sliced mode is allowed.

14. The "statistics are always current in SST" characteristic is the least important thing to know about your LAN adapter. It doesn't affect the capabilities of your adapter.  Instead, it only reports that the hardware and driver do maintain active statistics that are available for the NTRACE software to query.  Without these statistics, NTRACE may not have any way of determining if frames are being lost.

However, it is important to note that even if statistics are NOT always current in SST, most drivers and hardware allow these statistics to be dynamically queried, which NTRACE will handle.

What is important but not listed here, is that some MAC drivers do not support statistics in a NDIS-compliant manner, but there is no way to learn it before NTRACE is installed and a trace is actually being taken.

Supported Adapter Hardware