Network General - The Sniffer Analyzer R5.00 installation

[jimmyq]

I have a Network General "IBM Ethenet PCMCIA Card" with "The
Sniffer Network Analyzer R5.00 Software for Ethernet". (1998) Does anyone know the best way of getting this to work. I tried installing the card and drivers on a DELL 3500 laptop and it wouldn't work. Is this only supported on certain laptops. Any feed back is greatly appreciated.

 

[WildJoe]

As I recall you have to set your machine up to dual-boot, either to Windows, or to DOS. In the old days when Win 3.11 was, essentially, a DOS app you would use the boot configuration screen to make a selection. You could NEVER run the DOS Sniffer in a DOS window, or Command mode from within Windows. You ALWAYS had to do an initial boot to DOS. I suggest that you make a DOS boot floppy, boot to DOS, and try the install then. Make sure you make a backup copy of any CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT file that may exist since R5.00 DOS Sniffer will modify these.

 

[Knopp]

I used to have lots of problems with PCMCIA drivers when using DOS. Is not that simples as in Windows. If your notebook plays that BEEP when detect an PCMCIA card, pay attention if it is detecting the Ethernet card.

 

[WildJoe]

I remember yet another thing from the DOS Sniffer days... there was a utility on the installation CD called "OSCOMMON" that you had to execute before you loaded the Sniffer. It seems to me that was only for a machine formatted with WIN 95 and then booted to DOS.

 

[DigitalHeMan]

What's the exact error message you are seeing? At what point do you face problems? How is the machine configured? What version of DOS are you using?

 

[cpete]

there was a utility on the installation CD called "OSCOMMON" that you had to execute before you loaded the Sniffer.

I am the author of oscommon. It was written about 5 years ago for DOS Sniffer 5.5. The program was a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident). As I recall, the main purpose of that utility was to share stack/heap and interrupt handlers between different components of Sniffer. Memory in the DOS model was a huge problem to deal with. Sniffer, in those days used every trick in the book to squeeze memory out of the under 1Meg limit. OSCommon was able to shave something like 32k from the memory footprint, which was significant in those days.

For those of you who are still DOS Sniffer fans, the product was great, but it had truly reached the end of it's rope. The transition to a Windows platform solved a LOT of memory management problems.

Chris