Troubleshooting

Overview

There are three main steps in the troubleshooting process.

View logs to review the posted messages, warnings and errors. See Application Messages and RCs and Device Driver Messages to assist in interpretation.
Run NTRACE with the query option to get a report of its assessment of the binding environment.
Run NTRDIAG to provide a detailed report on the installation and environment.

Query

NTRACE.EXE provides a query mode, which allows the display of a list of MAC adapters which are available for tracing. This allows the user to identify adapters by the "index" which is used by NTRACE (see Command Syntax section for the -a option). It also provides a mechanism to verify that the NTRACE.OS2 is bound to MAC adapters as expected.

Possibly of greater importance is the display of the basic characteristics of each adapter.

Sample output for protocol mode:

Sample output for service mode:

Interpreting "Network Traffic" Characteristic

The "Network Traffic" characteristic is a guage of the LAN adapter's capability to support full bidirectional frame capture. The Network Trace v1.0 had only some of this data in the query report. It reported on the Loopback characteristic. Starting in v1.1, a more useful metric is being reported. It has 4 possible values based on 2 criteria:

Loopback Support

No Loopback Support

Protocol Mode

"Bidirectional Limited"

This means that outbound frames can MOST OFTEN be captured. However, since loopback can sometimes be an unreliable source of frames, the bidirectional capability is "qualified" by the word "limited".

"Inbound Only"

Outbound frames are never captured.

Service Mode

"Bidirectional Excessive"

Not only can traffic be captured in both directions, but since loopback is on, most or all outbound frames will be captured twice. NTRACE has no way of determining which frames it should keep and which frames are duplicates. To resolve this issue, it is very important to disable loopback support in the associated MAC driver. This is often accomplished by a setting in PROTOCOL.INI.

This "capability" will also cause a performance impact, especially in heavily loaded networks. The MAC and protocol drivers will have to handle the outbound frames twice! This could cause significant problems and lead to lost frames.

LOOPBACK should be disabled for these MAC drivers.

"Bidirectional"

Full bidirectional capture with no limitations or issues.

Diagnostic Utility

A utility is provided which will extensively check an installation's validity. While no diagnostic routine is fool-proof, this tool will find 90% of the flaws with a Network Trace installation. The utility is named NTRDIAG.EXE and exists on the CD-ROM in the \utility directory. It requires 4 other executables to properly execute:

RXMISC.DLL - a library of shared functions
MACDUMP.EXE - a program that queries information from the NDIS protocol manager, PROTMAN.OS2
NTRDUMP.EXE - dumps the data segment from the NTRACE.OS2 driver
BINDTREE.EXE - queries a detailed report of the NDIS binding tree as provided by PROTMAN.OS2

These supporting executables usually reside in the same directory as NTRDIAG.EXE. The tool can be run directly from the CD-ROM as long as the current directory is WRITABLE. This allows for temporary files and other access as appropriate. If C: is a drive with write access (on WSOD this may NOT be always true!) and K: is the CD-ROM drive then:

[C:\]k:\utility\ntrdiag.exe

Running NTRDIAG.EXE

It is important to run NTRDIAG.EXE ONLY after Network Trace is both installed and has been booted at least once since the last change to CONFIG.SYS or PROTOCOL.INI. If this assumption is not valid, then NTRDIAG may return inconsistant results. Remember that NTRDIAG.EXE does not work on a WSOD client!

NTRDIAG.EXE runs in the following modes:

data collection mode

NTRDIAG output-file-spec

In this mode it creates a file to be sent to the technical support team. This mode is designed to be run on target machines.

on-site analysis mode

NTRDIAG

In this mode it inspects the target machine for installation problems and lists its recommendations.

technical support diagnostic mode

NTRDIAG /i:input-file-spec

This mode is designed to be exploited by technical support. It inspects the input file data previously collected at the target machine (data collection run) and lists its recommendations. Some interactive analysis is previewed.

In any mode you can specify the /noansi option to suppress ANSI screen control codes.

What NTRDIAG Checks

there are >= 1 (same) RXMISC.DLL instances
CONFIG.SYS is a readable text file in the root directory of the OS/2 boot partition
DEVICE=...PROTMAN.OS2 can be located in CONFIG.SYS
PROTOCOL.INI can be located and read
DEVICE=...LANMSGDD can be located in CONFIG.SYS
LANTRAN.LOG can be located and read
CALL NETBIND.EXE is present in CONFIG.SYS
RUN LANMSGEX is present in CONFIG.SYS
DEVICE=...NTRACE.OS2 can be located in CONFIG.SYS
LANMSGDD precedes PROTMAN.OS2 in CONFIG.SYS
NTRACE.OS2 follows PROTMAN.OS2 in CONFIG.SYS
NTR.MSG can be located
all NTRACE.OS2 file instances are the same
all NTR.MSG file instances are same
there are >= 1 (same) NTRACE.EXE instances
there are >= 1 (same) BINDTREE.EXE instances
there are >= 1 (same) MACDUMP.EXE instances
there are >= 1 (same) NTRDUMP.EXE instances
there are >= 1 (same) valid instances of LICENSE.NTO
there are >= 1 properly named instances of NTRACE.OS2 in CONFIG.SYS
LANTRAN.LOG shows no error messages from NTRACE.OS2
PROTOCOL.INI contains valid sections for all installed instances of NTRACE.OS2
MACDUMP shows correct NTRACE.OS2 bindings