Installation Requirements

Install Program

There is no installation program for Network Trace. This omission is intentional, as the expected audience of this product is:

consultants and developers
large corporate IT departments

Since this audience is highly technical and the installations will most often be done on a large number of standardized machines, there is very little value to a generic, graphical installation program. Specifically, these environments will require a great deal of customization. Golden Code has made a conscious decision to provide the details of the underpinnings of the product, rather than to attempt to plan for every possible installation contingency. The idea is to provide as much detail about the installation and configuration of this product as is possible. This way each customer may implement the product in the most optimal manner for their environment.

Before starting the installation, it is critically important to have read the planning sections of this document. In particular, a decision on the mode of operation must be made.

The basic installation process itself has 4 phases:

installing the device driver NTRACE.OS2 and the message file NTR.MSG
configuring NTRACE

editing CONFIG.SYS which loads the driver(s)
editing PROTOCOL.INI which configures the driver(s) and NDIS environment

rebooting to activate these system configuration changes
installing the application, license key file and utilities in a convenient location

Minimum Installation

In order to take a network trace, the installation MUST contain the following:

NTRACE.OS2 device driver must be loaded in CONFIG.SYS and appropriately configured in PROTOCOL.INI
NTR.MSG must reside in an appropriate directory
NTRACE.EXE and LICENSE.NTO must be on an available file system for the local machine

the license key file must be located in an appropriate directory to ensure that NTRACE can find its license information at the time of tracing
the simplest installation is to place both of these files in the same directory

Pathing Requirements

The NDIS driver (NTRACE.OS2) and NIF (NTRACE.NIF) file are normally added to the MPTS directory structure itself. The most common location is X:\IBMCOM\PROTOCOL where X: is the drive on which MPTS is installed. However, it is possible to load the driver from any other directory at boot time, as the driver is NOT a BASEDEV.

The NIF file is only used when using the MPTS graphical user interface. The NIF file contains the necessary information to allow the MPTS GUI to prompt the user for configuration and binding. MPTS then will use this information to update CONFIG.SYS and PROTOCOL.INI. This method of installation can only be used if NTRACE is being installed in PROTOCOL mode. In SERVICE mode, the MPTS GUI cannot be used. In either case, the NIF file is NOT required for the operation of the NDIS driver.

The NTR.MSG file MUST be in one of a limited set of directories for the LANMSGDD interface to work. It is this interface that allows the protocol driver to log messages into LANTRAN.LOG and FFST. No logging will be available, if the NTR.MSG file is not properly installed. In addition, it will hinder the proper display of application specific errors or warnings. The NTR.MSG file should not be confused with the message files that are used by the HELP facility in OS/2. These files are specially designed to work with this facility and can be placed anywhere in the DPATH. This is not the case with NTR.MSG.

It is convenient to locate the NTRACE.EXE in a directory that is in the PATH. This will avoid forcing the user to switch to the directory before starting to trace. The NTRACE.EXE and the license file LICENSE.NTO are the only files needed to trace, other than the NTRACE.OS2 and NTR.MSG.

In previous releases, the NTRDIAG.EXE utility had very specific pathing restrictions. These restrictions are no longer in force. All NTRDIAG pathing is now flexible. However, NTRDIAG.EXE requires access to the following files on a local disk:

RXMISC.DLL
MACDUMP.EXE
NTRDUMP.EXE
BINDTREE.EXE

NTRDIAG.EXE will search all available local drives for these files. If it does not find one or more of these files, it will display an error. If it finds one instance of each of these files, then it will dynamically load (RXMISC.DLL) or call (*.EXE) the other modules from the location found.

If NTRDIAG finds multiple instances of any of these files, this will be reported and preference for loading/calling will be given to the instance that resides with the current version of Network Trace. If there is no such file, the most recent file found will be used.

In order to minimize the impact on system configuration, Golden Code recommends placing all of the utilities in the same directory. The user will have to fully qualify the path to these executables or will have to change to this directory before launching. Since these are programs that are seldom run, it may not be a big burden on the user.

Example pathing (assumes IBMCOM is installed on C:):

C:\IBMCOM\PROTOCOL\NTRACE.OS2
C:\IBMCOM\PROTOCOL\NTRACE.NIF
C:\IBMCOM\NTR.MSG

D:\NTRACE\NTRACE.EXE
D:\NTRACE\LICENSE.NTO

D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\NTRDIAG.EXE
D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\RXMISC.DLL
D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\MACDUMP.EXE
D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\BINDTREE.EXE
D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\MACSTAT.EXE
D:\NTRACE\UTILITY\NTRDUMP.EXE

Please see the File Listing for the specific pathing requirements on a module by module basis.

Locked Files

As long as the NTRACE.OS2 device driver is loaded into memory, the NTR.MSG file will be locked. This file CANNOT be replaced or removed while the driver is loaded, so one of the following strategies is required:

utilize IBM's locked file device driver

changes are made to the CONFIG.SYS to load a driver than can process a list of generic file system "commands"

DEVICE=C:\OS2\INSTALL\IBMLANLK.SYS LISTFILE.LST

RUN=C:\OS2\INSTALL\IBMLANLK.EXE LISTFILE.LST

these lines MUST be loaded AFTER the HPFS IFS but BEFORE other drivers are loaded
this driver requires a "list file" (LISTFILE.LST in the example above) which defines the script of actions it should take
example list file called NTRMSG.LST (assuming that the current CONFIG.SYS is backed up to CONFIG.NTR)

COPY D:\PACKAGE\NTR.MSG C:\IBMCOM\NTR.MSG

COPY CONFIG.NTR C:\CONFIG.SYS

ERASE CONFIG.NTR

ERASE NTRMSG.LST

note that this list file MUST end in a 0x1A as an end of file (EOF) character
please see this example REXX program that can be run to handle this (LOCKDD.CMD)

reboot with a CONFIG.SYS which does not load the NTRACE.OS2