PicLan Version 2.0.0.1 Release Announcement

For more information about PicLan contact: sales@modsoft.com or visit http://modsoft.com

PicLan Version 2.0.0.1 will be available soon

August 25, 1996

PicLan version 2.0.0.1 is currently being released for all platforms. This document discusses the elements that this release addresses. This release is considered a minor upgrade.

New Features

The following new feature have been added to version 2.0.0.1:

PCI Driver Load

The PL-LOAD program will display the PCI chip type, IRQ, and I/O base address during load. This can make debugging PCI conflict problems easier.

New DSG Function

A function for DOS file rename is being added to PLSUB.DSG and to the PL-TERM, PL-DSG, and PL-DSGW programs.

Code Changes

Numerour internal code cleanups are being included in this build. These changes were not intended to fix any specific bugs, but instead were intended to reduce code size and cleanup code re-use between platforms.

VB SDK Integration

The VB SDK toolkit version 2.0 is now used to build PLTW.EXE and PLTW32.EXE.

PLTW32.EXE Overhead Tuning

The background processing scheduling for PLTW32 has been enhanced. It was noted that PLTW32 would cause an NT 3.51 system to run somewhat slowly if there were more than 3 copies running (on a Pentium 90 with 32 Meg). The new release is more definative about giving up time when not busy and should allow more instances without system degredation.

Bug Fixes

The following bugs are fixed in version 2.0.0.1:

PLTW.EXE / PLTW32.EXE

Minimizing and maximizing the windows will no longer produce a VB run-time error.

PLTW32.EXE

The type mismatch VB run-time error during startup has been fixed.

PCI Driver

Additional testing in-house revealed that the PCI adapters have been programmed in "promiscuous" mode. This did not directly effect PicLan, as it checks addresses carefully, but placing the Pick host on a busy segment would result in unnecessary overhead within the PicLan driver.

PL-CFG.INI File Locating

A bug in the code used to locate the PL-CFG.INI file has been fixed. This now allows you to set an environment variable to specify a particular INI file.

DOS Install Fix

The DOS INSTALL.EXE program has been fixed to correctly scan all disks for installation files.

Soft Ethernet Frame Type Restructuring

The internal logic to support soft frame types has been modified to work better on networks that do have routers. If your network has an Ethernet router, the soft frame type logic will give preference to the native frame type of the local end of the connection when scanning for PicLan servers. If the other end of a connection is available both over a router and via a single direct hop using a soft frame type, then the single direct hop will be chosen.