
  REMOTE OFFICE

  RELEASE NOTES
  VERSION 1.2.0
  02/01/94

  CONTENTS

  1.  KNOWN PROBLEMS WITH THIS RELEASE

  2.  DOCUMENTATION CORRECTIONS

  3.  RUNNING ROFFICE AS A HOST

  4.  RUNNING ROFFICE AS A REMOTE CLIENT

  5.  OPERATING CONSIDERATIONS

  6.  DOCUMENTATION of ADDED FEATURES

  7.  WINDOWS 3.1 CONSIDERATIONS

  8.  ASSIGNMENT of ETHERNET ADDRESSES

  9.  TROUBLE SHOOTING / TECH TIPS

  10. NULL MODEM PINOUTS


  1. KNOWN PROBLEMS WITH THIS RELEASE

  INTEL drivers:
  If you are using an Intel board in the Remote Office Host, you will
  not be able to use the NDIS driver to interface to the network.
  You will, however, be able to use the ODI driver that ships with the
  Remote Office product.  For configuration information, call
  Stampede Technical Support at (513) 291-5035.


  2. DOCUMENTATION CORRECTIONS

  The Installation and Administration Guide on page 95, when discussing
  the NETBEUI protocol.ini parameters (fourth bullet), refers you to
  a non-existent Appendix C.  The correct Appendix should be
  Appendix A.


  3. RUNNING ROFFICE AS A HOST

    Remote Office binds to the Network adapter using one of two driver
    interfaces.  The Interface used depends on the LAN Operating System
    choosen at installation time.

    ODI Interface:
        None
        Netware 2.15 or above
        Netware Lite
        LANtastic/AI 4.1 or above
        Windows for Workgroups 3.1 & 3.11

    NDIS Interface:
        10Net 5.1
        Lan Manager 2.0 or Above

    Putting it all together for the host:

    After having set up your interface to the NIC, defined your interface
    to the modems, and defined the users that may dial into the host, the
    system creates a batch file called ROSTART.BAT which illustrates how
    to bring up Remote Office.

    In general terms you would do the following:

        1. Execute your NIC NDIS or ODI driver
        2. Execute ROFFICE.EXE
        3. Execute either ODIROF-E, NDROF-E, or LTROF-E
        4. Execute transport protocol (e.g. IPX, NETBEUI)
        5. Perform any Bind, if necessary
        7. LOAD LAN/OS

    If you have any questions on a particular configuration, run
    "ROSTART HELP", and it will give detailed information for the
    configuration you have installed.


  4. RUNNING ROFFICE AS A REMOTE CLIENT

  LANMAN / Window for Workgroups / BANYAN / 10NET - NDIS Driver

     The following illustrates what should be specified in your
     protocol.ini file:

     [PROTMAN]
         drivername = PROTMAN$
         dynamic = yes

     [NDROF-E]
         drivername = NDROF-E$

     [PROTOCOL_DEPENDENT]
         drivername = "protocol_dependent"$ (e.g. NETBEUI$)
         bindings = NDROF-E

     The NDROF-E provides an NDIS MAC interface into ROFFICE.  The
     Lan Operating system transport protocol binds to the NDROF-E
     MAC driver.

  NetWare / NetWare Lite - ODI Driver

   The following illustrates what must be specified in your net.cfg
   file:

      #
      # define ODIROF-E as board #1
      #
      Link Driver ODIROF-E
         frame ETHERNET_802.3
      ;   frame ETHERNET_802.2
      ;   frame ETHERNET_II

      Protocol IPX
         bind #1

      Entries following a "Link Driver .." or "Protocol .." line
      must be indented at least 1 space.

      ODIROF-E provides an ODI MAC interface into ROFFICE.  IPX
      binds to the specified frame type defined for ODIROF-E.

  LANtastic/AI - LANtastic Native Driver

    LANtastic does not require any configuration files. Simply load
    ROFFICE.EXE and LTROF-E.exe.  This program provides a native
    LANtastic interface into Remote Office.

  FTP - Packet Driver

    A file called PKROF-E.EXE provides a packet driver interface into
    ROFFICE.EXE.  No special configuration is required.

  Putting it all together for the client:

    After having defined your interface to the modems and defined the
    Roffice hosts that you will dial into, refer to the ROSTART.BAT
    file which was created for you at system installation time.

    In general terms you would do the following:

      1. Execute ROFFICE.EXE
      2. Execute either ODIROF-E, NDROF-E, LTROF-E, or PKROF-E
      3. Execute transport protocol (e.g. IPX, NETBEUI)
      4. Bind if necessary
      5. Do "RO LOGIN" to set up communications with the host
      6. Run LAN/OS

    If you have any questions on a particular LAN OPERATING system,
    run "ROSTART HELP", and it will give detailed information for the
    configuration that you have installed.


  5. OPERATING CONSIDERATIONS

  It is important to consider that Remote Office acts as an actual node
  on the network, and that all traffic generated by the client will
  actually be sent across the telephone link.  Therefore, we highly
  recommend that special consideration be given when planning for login
  scripts.  It is vital that scripts be designed to run applications off
  of the local drive, not the server.  For instance, when running in a
  Netware environment, if the login script were to perform a capture
  command, the entire CAPTURE.EXE program would be transferred across
  the telephone link to the local CPU.  This adds unnecessary overhead
  to an already slower process.  Instead, it is preferable to store the
  CAPTURE.EXE program on the client drive, and configure the script to
  execute it from the client drive.

  Application planning is also an important consideration.  In keeping
  with the above discussion, you would not want the remote client to
  load applications from a network drive.  Again, this adds unnecessary
  traffic on the wire. The server should be used as a data repository,
  accessed by an application loaded off the client's local drive.


  6. DOCUMENTATION of ADDED FEATURES

  TTY Interface:

  If "Enter TTY mode after inital login phone call" is checked in the
  phonebook record, then the interactive Remote Office Login utility
  programs (both Windows and Dos) will enter "TTY" mode immediately
  after the phone connection is established.  In TTY mode, your
  computer acts as a teletype terminal emulator so that you can
  manually respond to special security prompting devices that may
  be attached to your dial-in network.  While in TTY mode all
  characters that are typed in are immediately transmitted over the
  communications link without being echoed locally, and any received
  characters are immediately displayed.  Hit the "ALT E" key
  sequence to end the TTY mode and resume the Remote Office login.

  Broadcast Filtering:

  The Remote Office client may request that the Remote Office host
  filter all broadcast messages.  A broadcast message is defined as
  a message that has a destination MAC address of 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF.
  In some environments, filtering out the broadcast messages will
  substantially reduce the amount of traffic that is sent over the
  serial communications link.  In some environments, broadcast
  messages may be crucial to the operation of an application.
  Enabling and disabling of broadcast filtering must be performed prior
  to loading ROFFICE.EXE.  Broadcast filtering may be enabled from the
  interactive "Load Options" setup screen or by using the command line
  "RO CFGCH FILTERBCS=Y/N".

  Data Compression Options:

  Currently a Remote Office Client may specify one of the following
  compression methods for session traffic between the host and client:

        0=Off   - No Compression should be used
        1=LZW   - Lempel-Ziv-Welch
        2=RLE   - Run Length Encoding

  We have made the default setting RLE compression.  This algorithm takes
  little CPU and memory resources and compliments modem compression well.

  The LZW algorithm is much more powerful but, it takes an extra 8K of
  memory.  When LZW is employed, it effectively makes any modem
  compression redundant.  You will probably find that your transfer
  speed will improve by about ten percent if you turn modem compression
  off with LZW.

  Polled Transmit Mode:

  We have found that some PCMCIA modems generate a profuse amount of
  transmit interrupts.  This can interfere with reliable operations
  particularly in a WINDOWS environment.  Therefore, we have implemented
  an option to perform all transmits in polled mode.  This option is only
  available on a client.  To enable this mode of operation, use the "RO
  PORTCH POLL=YES" command.


  7. ASSIGNMENT of ETHERNET ADDRESSES

  If a LAN Operating system is running on the Remote Office host PC,
  Remote Office uses the same ethernet address that is assigned to
  the network card.

  On the client machines, Roffice generates a random ethernet address
  at installation time.  The first six digits of this address will
  begin with 02,6f,6f.  You may change the ethernet address by using
  the "RO CFGCHANGE" function on the host or client, or by using the
  interactive RO utility under SETUP, REMOTE OFFICE LOAD OPTIONS.

  If your Ethernet card does not support promiscuous mode, it may be
  necessary to interface to the LAN using multicast addresses.  In this
  case, the Roffice host will add it to the list of addresses that the
  network interface card will recognize. The second hex digit
  distinguishes a multicast address from a normal ethernet address. If
  the second hex digit is an odd number then it is a multicast address
  otherwise it is a normal ethernet address.  If you must access the
  network in MULTICAST mode, you must also modify the second digit
  of the machines calling in to make it an odd number (e.g. 016f6f...).

  The Remote Office host will interface to the NIC using multicast
  addresses by entering "ROFFICE PROMISCUOUS=NO" when invoking
  ROFFICE.EXE.  You can also set multicast mode through the interactive
  utility or by entering "RO CFGCH PROMISCUOUS=NO".

  8. WORKING WITH WINDOWS 3.1

  A virtual device driver called VROF.386 is provided with Remote
  Office.  VROF.386 greatly improves I/O to a serial port by
  interfacing to the port using 80386 instructions.

  VROF.386 is automatically loaded when Windows loads in enhanced
  mode.  You can disable VROF.386 using the command
  "RO CFGCH VROF386=NO" before roffice.exe is loaded. If VROF.386
  loads, no changes are required for your system.ini file.

  If you choose not to run VROF.386, then when running in enhanced
  mode, make sure that "device=vcd" is in your "system.ini" file.  If
  going into a  DOS box, you must make sure that "COMxAutoAssign=0",
  'x' indicating the port Remote Office is connected, is set
  in your "system.ini" file in the "[386Enh]" section. This can be
  accomplished either with a text editor or by going into the control
  panel's 386 Enhanced section and  choose 'Never Warn' for the
  corresponding COM port.  This prevents Windows from displaying
  warning mesages in a DOS box while Remote OFfice is communicating.

  It may be necessary to set your baud rate to 19,200 or below when running
  Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode.  Microsoft recommends this unless you have
  16550 serial ports on your computer (most computers are not equipped
  with 16550s).


  9. TROUBLE SHOOTING / TECH TIPS

  DO NOT plan on running applications from a server across the telephone
  link.  This mode of operation is not recommended because of the slow
  telephone link speed.  Applicatons should instead be run from the
  clients own disk drive, and the server used for data data
  storage / retrieval.

  If you experience slowness at login time, check the scripts that might
  be executing to see that they do not load applications from the
  server.  If this is the case, you may wish to alter the scripts for
  remote users to load programs from their local drives.

  It is recommended that network drives be removed from the search path.
  This would help prevent accidental loading of utility programs across
  the link.

  If you receive error 255 when using NDIS at bind time, this may
  indicate that the protocol stack is rejecting your node address because
  it is a multicast address.  To remedy this, change your node address to
  a non-multicast address and run the host in promiscuous mode.

  On some machines the default port setting (100h) for the
  2, 4, and 8 port DigiBoards may cause an I/O port conflict.  If you are
  experiencing lock ups, you may wish to change the settings to port 320h.
  This is done by setting all the dip switches to the off position.

  You will find a wealth of command line functionality by entering
  "RO /?" or "RO /HELP".  The most useful commands are "RO FIND" and
  "RO SHOW".  RO.EXE commands may be abbreviated, for example
  "RO F D3" is the same as "RO FIND DIGI_3".

  Modem String Considerations:  In general, we have set the modem strings
  to maximize echoing of status messages when modem commands are being
  issued.  The following settings are required:

   - The carrier detect signal must be tracked. (Usually  &C1 ).
   - Modem should hang up if DTR is dropped (Usually  &D2 ).
   - Enable RTS/CTS flow control (Usually  &K3)

  We have set the default modem strings to allow the modems to
  negotiate error correction and compression.  This provides the
  greatest degree of interoperability between different modem types.

  When working in a Netware environment, the Remote Office client must
  be logged into the Remote Office host or NETX will not load.
  (NETX will not load unless it finds a server)

  Special command line options are required when running a Lan Manager
  client on a Remote Office host.  See the HLANMAN.TXT for further
  configuration information.  If you specified Lan Manager as your
  Lan Operating system at Remote Office installation time,
  then this file will be located in the Remote Office directory, if
  not, you can find it in the LANOSDEP directory of the INSTALL disk.

  Banyan Vines: If your Remote Office host will serve Banyan Vines
  clients it will be necessary to use the "vines=yes" command line
  parameter when running roffice.exe (e.g. "roffice vines=yes").  For
  special instructions for Banyan Remote Office clients see the
  CBANYAN.TXT file.

  If you experience lost sessions on a particular port,  use the "RO
  FIND" command to show statistics on that port.  For example, if you are
  interested in stats for port "DIGI_1", type in "RO FIND DIGI_1" and
  note any transmit timeouts and FCS errors.  FCS stands for
  "Frame Check Sequence" and is analogous to a CRC or block check.  FCS
  errors indicate that characters are being dropped and you may have to
  decrease the baud rate.

  A shortage of either Buffers or DSA can lead  to subtle problems
  that are very easily overlooked.  If you are experiencing problems
  with a remote client, check the Peak Buffer Usage and the DSA
  available for possible shortages.

  If you wish to use a phone card when dialing, simply build the number
  into the dial string when configuring the phone number of the host.
  For many modems, the following characters may be used to facilitate
  credit card dialing:

     ,           Pause about 2 seconds
     W           Wait for a second dial tone
     @           Wait for silence
     !           Issue hookflash

  When running modems and computers off of batteries,  we have found
  that some makes of laptop computers and modems, running with
  batteries that are not fully charged, may have reliability problems
  sustaining a Remote Office session when running at higher speeds.
  If you are having connection trouble, check the battery level or try
  running with AC power.

  If you have a call waiting feature on your phone system, this may
  interfere with your Remote Office connection.  You may elect to
  modify your Modem dial strings (or phonebook records) to turn call
  waiting off by putting "*70" as part of the string.  You could also
  modify your modem hang-up string to turn call waiting back on.


  10. NULL MODEM CABLE SPECIFICATION
   
  The following are the correct specifications for working NULL
  modem cables:

  25 PIN to 25 PIN Cable:
  
  Pin 2 crossed with pin 3 on the opposite connector
  Pin 4 crossed with pin 5 on the opposite connector
  Pin 6 connected to pin 20 on both connectors
  Pins 6 and 20 connected to pin 8 on the opposite connector
  Pin 7 connected to pin 7 on the opposite connector

  9 Pin to 9 Pin Cable:

  Pin 1 connected to pin 6 on both connectors
  Pin 2 crossed with pin 3 on the opposite connector
  Pins 1 and 6 connected to pin 4 on the opposite connector
  Pin 7 crossed with pin 8 on the opposite connector
  Pin 5 connected to pin 5 on the opposite connector

  9 Pin to 25 Pin Cable:

  Pin 1 (9 Pin Side) conected to pin 6 on the (9 Pin side)
  Pin 8 (25 Pin Side) connected to pin 6 on the (25 Pin side)
  Pin 2 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pin 3 (25 Pin Side)
  Pin 3 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pin 2 (25 Pin Side)
  Pins 1 and 6 (9 Pin Side) connected to pin 20 (25 Pin Side)
  Pin 4 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pins 6 and 8 (25 Pin Side)
  Pin 7 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pin 5 (25 Pin Side)
  Pin 8 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pin 4 (25 Pin Side)
  Pin 5 (9 Pin Side) connected to Pin 7 (25 Pin Side)


