--------------------------- LANtronix --------------------------- ETS/EPS --------------------------- Terminal and Printer Server --------------------------- Software Release Notes --------------------------- Version V3.5/2 July 22, 1997 Copyright 1997, Lantronix Release notes are also available using the Lantronix media support and download system or via anonymous FTP from ftp.lantronix.com. Contact Lantronix or your reseller for more information. This document describes the Lantronix Terminal/Printer Server software release. Release Summary =============== V3.5/2 ------ V3.5/2 provides traditional terminal and print server functionality, including the TCP/IP, Novell, Appletalk, Lan Manager and LAT protocols on the ETS4P4, ETS8/16, ETS8P/16P, and EPS4/12 platforms. Appletalk, Lan Manager and Novell support is limited to print serving. V3.5/2 provides print server functionality, including the TCP/IP, Novell, Appletalk, Lan Manager and LAT protocols on the EPS2P2, EPS4P1, EPS1/2, LPS and MPS platforms. Note that these units are print servers. They will not allow outgoing connections to hosts. V3.5/2 provides terminal server functionality, including TCP/IP, Novell and LAT protocols on the MSS1 platform. Note that V3.5/2 software will only download on LPS1 units with a Boot ROM revision of V2.4 or greater. (The ECO revision must be "CA3" or greater.) New Features ============ The following is a list of new features in V3.5/2. Windows 32-bit Redirector ------------------------- To use the MSS1 with V3.5/2 software with the Lantronix 32-bit Windows Redirector, you must upgrade the Redirector to V1.1/1 or newer. The reverse is also true: To use V1.1/1 of the 32-bit Windows Redirector with the MSS1, you must be running at least V3.5/2 on the MSS1. Users of the 16-bit Windows and DOS redirectors need not upgrade. Note that the redirectors are only supported on the MSS1. Netware SAP Packets ------------------- The ability to disable Novell SAP packets from the server has been added. Use the command: DEFINE PROTOCOL NETWARE SAP [47|52c] [ENABLED|DISABLED] to enable/disable SAP broadcasts. Note that disabling type 0x47 SAPs will prevent epscon/mpscon from connecting to the server. By default, both SAP broadcasts are enabled. Netware RIP Packets ------------------- The ability to disable Netware RIP broadcasts from the server has been added. This will prevent the server from advertising it's internal network number. Use the command: DEFINE PROTOCOL NETWARE RIP [ENABLED|DISABLED] to enable/disable RIP broadcasts from this server. By default, RIP broadcasts are enabled. Netware Polling Interval ------------------------ The ability to change the Netware job polling interval has been added. Use the command: DEFINE PROTOCOL NETWARE POLL where is the number of seconds between each request the print server makes asking the Novell file server if it has a job to be processed. The default value is 9 seconds with a valid range from 1 to 255 seconds. MSS1 Specific Enhancements -------------------------- On the MSS1, the netware protocol stack can be completely disabled. Use the command: CHANGE NETWARE [ENABLED|DISABLED] Note that the MSS1 must be rebooted for this command to take effect. Resolved Problems ================= Miscellaneous ------------- On the ETS4P4, ETS8P and ETS16P terminal servers, under certain conditions a serial port could get "stuck" thinking it had output that needed to be processed. The only way to clear this condition was to log out the port. During the boot sequence the servers send a loopback packet to detect the presence of a valid network connection. The protocol field value has been changed to 0xBEAD so that Network General sniffers do not issue a network error message. When telnetting into the ETS8P/16P, issuing commands that would generate a lot of screen output could overflow a stack and cause the server to lock up. When a port was defined as access remote and there was no network connection to the port and an attached serial device was spewing data, the server was not able to accept network connections. The server software has been optimized to do a better job of discarding the serial data which will then allow a network connection to be established. Several invalid settings for parallel ports (modem, passflow) are now ignored when a user attempts to set them. The Signal Check option has been added to the MPS as a valid parallel port characteristic. The SET/DEFINE SERVER DUMP command has been removed. Netware ------- When processing a Netware print job, a Novell 4.1 file server could log an error message saying that the response to a "readjob" request contained an invalid NCP command length value. Printing using RPRINTER was not working on the LPS1, MPS1, ETS2P2, and EPS4P1. If the Novell NDS tree that the user specified was not found, log an error message using the NDS error code. TCP/IP ------ When forming a telnet connection to a host, retry the connection multiple times to allow connections to dialup hosts to work. The retry sequence can be stopped by pressing any key during the connect sequence. Null padding of carriage return characters, i.e. to , was not occurring on incoming telnet socket connections. If a primary gateway could not be reached, the server was not correctly failing over to the secondary gateway. During a server's boot sequence when it was checking to see if it's IP address is in use, it could mistakenly believe that another node on the network was using the IP address. The IP "Type of Service" (TOS) bit was set not set to normal service. If the hex character 0xff was received on the serial port and sent out the network over a telnet connection (i.e. telnet IAC interpretation should be done) the MSS1 was not properly quoting the 0xff character. Known Problems ============== The following problems are known in V3.5/2. Printing directly from a Windows for Workgroups machine is not supported because of a problem in WFW. If the print server is flow controlled by the printer and in turn flow controls the WFW host machine, the WFW host will abort the print job. This means that if the print job is larger than the print server's internal buffer (maximum 4Kbytes) the print job will fail. The only workaround for this problem is to spool the jobs from the WFW machine to a Windows NT machine and print to the print server from there. LPD printing from Solaris machines is problematic due to the way Sun has implemented the Solaris spooling system. This problem has been reported to Sun. Their suggested workaround is "Do not print using LPD from Solaris machines to network based print servers. Instead use the vendor supplied printer interface programs." For Lantronix print servers this is the RTEL software. Please see the RTEL man pages for more information about configuration and use.