This time, I went back and searched and cannot find that the topic came up.
Flame me if you wish, but I made a good-faith effort to search the archives
abou this.
I have several machines that are running Windows for Workgroups, on an
ethernet that is connected (via an OR-LS router) to the Internet. I want
the machines to be able to do their networking as they do now, and I want to
be able to have a Winsock stack that permits the use of Winsock applications
on the machines. I find, on the Livingston website at
<http://www.livingston.com/Tech/Appnotes/app.wfw-wolverine.shtml>, a mention
of the Wolverine TCP stack for WFW. Here's the thing, to install that stack
one must go into Windows Network Setup and add the TCP/IP protocol to the
network setup, which is fine except that it seems to allow the whole world
to come in via the router and sniff around the Windows Network.
If an IP packet reaches my TCP stack on a WFW machine, how does the stack
know whether the packet has to do with Winsock things (e.g. it is not a
packet having to do with printer sharing or file sharing on the WFW network)
or whether the packet has to do with non-Winsock things such as printer
sharing or file sharing on the WFW network? I assume the answer is "by the
IP port number, dummy, RTFM". But I don't see any mention of port numbers
for WFW networking in the documentation that comes with Wolverine. I could
start doing IP packet tracing to see what port numbers come in and out of
the stack when there is no traditional IP activity (news, email, web) going
on, but that would not tell me if I know of *all* the port numbers that WFW
uses for its activities.
If I could know these port numbers, then I could set up filters to keep the
outside world from sniffing around the WFW network.
Alternatively, I wonder if there is some way to tell Wolverine that it
should use, say, only Netbeui or IPX but not TCP/IP for its WFW networking,
and to pass TCP/IP packets only to Winsock and not to the printer-sharing
and file-sharing parts of WFW. If such a setup could be made in Wolverine
this would be worth doing, seems to me.
Maybe someone else has already figured all this out, in which case I would
be most grateful if you could share this with me.
Thanks.
Carl Oppedahl
--- Carl Oppedahl, Oppedahl & Larson, patent law firm http://www.patents.com/ has hundreds of pages of answers to frequently asked questions on patent, copyright, and trademark law