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April 2001

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OS/2 Tips

We scan the Web, Usenet and the OS/2 mail lists looking for these gems. Have you run across an interesting bit of information about OS/2 recently? Please share it with all our readers. Send your tips to tips@os2voice.org. If you are interested in joining a particular OS/2 Mailing List, check out the VOICE Mailing List page for subscribing instructions for a large variety of existing Lists - http://www.os2voice.org/mailinglists.html.

Editor's note: these tips are from OS/2 users and in some cases can not be verified by myself. Please heed this as a warning that if you are not sure about something, don't do it.

February 13, 2001 - Our first tip for April comes from Bas Heijermans concerning tuning up Warp Server access:
If you have poor performance with Win-clients connected to a Warp Server and you are using Netbios/NetBeui.

Even Warp clients benefit from this change!

You can see this because you will have lot's of collitions on you hub.

The solution is the following:

Goto the IBMCOM directory and locate the file PROTOCOL.INI.

Edit this file and look for MAXIN = 1 and MAXOUT = 1.

Raise these values to 3 and save the file.

You have to reboot your Warp Server after this, and NOW look at your hub:-)

No more collisions and you will find a great improvement in Network speed.

February 16, 2001 - Julian Thomas on the os2user list offered this tip concerning squeezing files onto diskettes using BOOTOS2:
There's a trick to bootos2. If you look at the config.sys file, you should see an entry:

DEVICE=\OS2\BOS2DD.SYS

Anything before this is taken from diskette 1. Anything after comes from diskette 2. So if there's a DEVICE that won't fit on disk 1, put its line after the bos2dd.sys line and put the driver on diskette 2 (in the \os2 directory).

February 18, 2001 - Someone asked on the MR2ice list what a TNEF attachment was. Brandon S. Allbery gave the following response:
MS-TNEF is message data in Exchange internal format (MAPI Transport-Neutral Encoding Format"). There are some programs for Unix (probably available as EMX ports) which can extract attachments from them; look for a program called "tnef".
John Stewart added:
Yep, as Mr. Levine pointed out the tnef015.zip on Hobbes is an EMX port of something written for Unix that can read the TNEF files.

I downloaded it, and had a few issues. Turns out I needed a file gcc29166.dll.zip for the TNEF.exe to work properly, but with that everything seems golden. A prompt reply from the Team OS/2 Russia folks pointed me to it: http://teamos2.ru/files/gcc29166.dll.zip

February 19, 2001 - Someone asked on comp.os.os2.bugs what the difference was between the uni-processor kernel, Warp 4 and SMP kernel updates that have been appearing regularly on IBM's Testcase site. Holger Veit explained it as follows:
W4 is the Warp 4 kernel, supporting a single processor. UNI and SMP are two different SMP kernels for WSEB. They have certain things built-in for support of SMP, as well as large files (Dos*L APIs). All three are optimized in a different way, in that their code segments are laid out differently.

Beyond the technical issue: why different kernels? You could get away with the SMP version for all, right. Well, ask IBM...

So then Scott E. Garfinkle of IBM offered this insight:
There is overhead in the SMP kernel that can be eliminated in non-SMP kernels. Actually, we could do even more in that direction than we have. Oh, well. There's no real difference at all between the W4 and UNI kernels, at this point, except that the W4 kernel won't load a PSD (which is generally kind of useless on a UNI system, anyway) and also deliberately breaks the DosSetProcessorAffinity API so that the WPS can present a couple of obscure things differently on a W4 system than on a WSeB uni system.
February 20, 2001 - Having problems with an Adaptec 2940 U2W SCSI adapter? Or considering a new SCSI adapter. Julien Pierre has a web page that explains some issues he has experienced with Adaptec and compares that with a Tekram DC390 U3W.
http://www.madbrain.com/scsi.html for more information.
March 13, 2001 - In answer to someone's cry for help on the xworkplace-user list, Paul Ratcliffe offered the following REXX script to recreate the Drives Folder object, which was messed up. Might be a handy thing to have around:
Delete the Drives folder using BlackHole. Then run this REXX script to recreate it:

/**/
call RxFuncAdd 'SysLoadFuncs', 'REXXUTIL', 'SysLoadFuncs'
call SysLoadFuncs
class = 'WPDrives'
title = 'Drives'
location = '<WP_CONNECTIONSFOLDER>'
setup = 'NODELETE=YES;NOPRINT=YES;OBJECTID=<WP_DRIVES>;'
call SysCreateObject class, title, location, setup, 'R'

March 16, 2001 - Duane Chamblee of Indelible Blue offered this information on the INETCFG command in comp.os.os2.networking.tcp-ip:
When changing multiple INETCFG parameters (or playing around ;-) remember this...
inetcfg -g
all creates the \mptn\etc\inetcfg.ini file. This file shows the current, default, minimum and maximum values. You can edit this file changing the "current" value to what you like then run...
inetcfg -s all
which will load the inetcfg.ini values. Add it to the \TCPIP\BIN\B4TCP.CMD file if you want this to happen at boot time. This is NOT done automatically at boot, only the DEFAULT values are used until you issue this -s or set command.
inetcfg -r all
resets everything to the default values. (if you screw up the stack, this will get it back). No reboots are required for these changes, they are done on the fly.
March 18, 2001 - The legendary Chris Graham of the Graham Utilities, was asking for help with a problem in comp.os.os2.bugs. Seems Chris couldn't get the TCP/IP Configuration Java applet TCPCFG2 to run, getting a "NullPointerException caught by client communication with server java.lang.NullPointerException". Ended up Chris found the answer himself:
The file C:\MPTN\ETC\DAT\TOXTFTPA.DAT was missing. These are parsing files that are used by TCPCFG2 to read/write the actual control files. I suggest that if you ever have similar problems, then look for similar missing files.

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