At 04:45 PM 8/1/96 -0400, Shirley A MacLaughlin wrote:
>Question:  How can these applications (RNS and TCPMAN) co-exist?
>
>I've resorted to alternate boot paths to use both, but this is not
>satisfactory.
>
>Any ideas?
 
Theoretically, a Winsock application can allow for multiple different
Winsocks libraries to be present (in different subdirectories) and to access
the appropriate one.  To quote the spec, "Nothing in the specification
should be interpreted as restricting multiple Windows Sockets DLLs from
being present and used concurrently by one or more Windows Sockets
applications.".
 
Well it looks good on paper, but I've never seen anyone do it.  RNS and
TCPMAN, in this case, are not applications but alternative transports.  Your
actual application, like Reflection 1 needs to be 'smart' enough to search
for multiple TCP/IPs.
 
"Hey", as my Marketing Lecturer used to say, "this sounds like an
opportunity area!".  How about someone create a common WINSOCK.DLL that
determines the caller's task, identifies the program, looks it up in a
database (.INI?) and invokes the appropriate WINSOCK.DLL for the program
(e.g. \WRQNET\WINSOCK.DLL, \FTP\WINSOCK.DLL, \MICR$OFT\WINSOCK.DLL).  Pretty
straightforward, but I've little idea how much overhead this shell will add
to performance.  Negligible I hope.  The only real processing delay would
occur during the WSASTARTUP, but after that it should simply use indexed
access (by Task Handle).
 
If your problem was merely getting Dial-up TCP/IP, then you could use the
Reflection Serial component of RNS 5.  Then again, I've had little success
with that and since it is SLIP, not PPP, I've not pursued it.
 
Cheers.
----
Jim "seMPEr" Wowchuk
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