TDI - Book recommendations?

NTDEV
1

Hello all,

I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on the
subject. I’m more than a little confused
by the docs regarding TDI clients vs TDI drivers and how all this fits
together in the network stack.

Thanks,

m

2

No books. Read the DDK help, or contact Thoma Divine, he may have some
samples for licensing.

----- Original Message -----
From: “MM”
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 12:43 PM
Subject: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?

> Hello all,
>
> I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on the
> subject. I’m more than a little confused
> by the docs regarding TDI clients vs TDI drivers and how all this fits
> together in the network stack.
>
> Thanks,
>
> m
>
>
>
> —
> Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
> http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

3

Dan Partelly wrote:

No books.

  • I was hoping I wouldn’t hear that.

Read the DDK help,

  • I hope the third time is a charm

contact Thomas Divine, he may have some samples for licensing.

-Samples are always nice, but those won’t guarantee I understand the
model correctly. Sample
code generally causes me to only half way understand something - I
consider it a hindrance
most of the time.

m

----- Original Message ----- From: “MM”
> To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 12:43 PM
> Subject: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?
>
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on
>> the subject. I’m more than a little confused
>> by the docs regarding TDI clients vs TDI drivers and how all this
>> fits together in the network stack.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> m
>>
>>
>>
>> —
>> Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
>> http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
>>
>> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
>> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>
>
> —
> Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
> http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

4

Matt,

Do you have some specific goal in mind (TDI client, TDI filter, TDI
transport)?

I recommend that (as Dan suggested) you read the DDK (again, and again, and
again) since it does ‘document’ the interface accurately although I would
hazard to say no one could actually build any of those three types of
drivers armed with just the DDK docs. You need to really understand the TDI
concept of Address (File) Object and Connection (File) Object along with
what a ‘Transport’ is. The DDK is pretty solid on these points.

Samples that have at one-time existed which would be of interest are:

  1. The NT4 DDK (and earlier) had a simple TDI Transport driver sample.
  2. The NT4 IFS Kit had the source for the TDI Client used by the sample
    network redirector.
  3. The MSFT Research web-site provided a download link for the source to
    the ‘research’ TCP/IP V6 stack for NT4/2K which was heavily derived from the
    TCPIP.SYS (IPV4) stack of NT4.
  4. There are some incredibly bad samples floating around of TDI firewall
    filters that are available for download (google will find them). You might
    find, however, a couple of ‘gems’ of detail in them but beware.
  5. I saw a CodeProject posting of a TDI client at one time. It was pretty
    slim and I cannot say as I read through the whole thing. I just noted it.
  6. Thomas Divine (a frequent poster to this list) has a wealth of
    information at www.pcausa.com or www.ndis.com
  7. At one time (and perhaps still) ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winsock
    or something like that had a file VXDTDI.ZIP perhaps? The file had the
    information needed to use TDI on Win95. It contains a document, however,
    about the TDI layer of Win95 as well as a VXD Winsock helper which
    interfaces through the Win9x TDI. I mention this because it is another
    source of ‘understanding’ of TDI and how to interact with it.

Good Luck,
Dave Cattley
Consulting Engineer
Systems Software Development

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of MM
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:44 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?

Hello all,

I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on the
subject. I’m more than a little confused by the docs regarding TDI clients
vs TDI drivers and how all this fits together in the network stack.

Thanks,

m

Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

5

For those following along with the home game

  1. Dave is an incredibly bad typist who cannot count before his third cup
    of coffee (now on desk) was omitted from the list below.

-dc

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of David R. Cattley
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 8:26 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?

Matt,

Do you have some specific goal in mind (TDI client, TDI filter, TDI
transport)?

I recommend that (as Dan suggested) you read the DDK (again, and again, and
again) since it does ‘document’ the interface accurately although I would
hazard to say no one could actually build any of those three types of
drivers armed with just the DDK docs. You need to really understand the TDI
concept of Address (File) Object and Connection (File) Object along with
what a ‘Transport’ is. The DDK is pretty solid on these points.

Samples that have at one-time existed which would be of interest are:

  1. The NT4 DDK (and earlier) had a simple TDI Transport driver sample.
  2. The NT4 IFS Kit had the source for the TDI Client used by the sample
    network redirector.
  3. The MSFT Research web-site provided a download link for the source to
    the ‘research’ TCP/IP V6 stack for NT4/2K which was heavily derived from the
    TCPIP.SYS (IPV4) stack of NT4.
  4. There are some incredibly bad samples floating around of TDI firewall
    filters that are available for download (google will find them). You might
    find, however, a couple of ‘gems’ of detail in them but beware.
  5. I saw a CodeProject posting of a TDI client at one time. It was pretty
    slim and I cannot say as I read through the whole thing. I just noted it.
  6. Thomas Divine (a frequent poster to this list) has a wealth of
    information at www.pcausa.com or www.ndis.com 8. At one time (and perhaps
    still) ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winsock
    or something like that had a file VXDTDI.ZIP perhaps? The file had the
    information needed to use TDI on Win95. It contains a document, however,
    about the TDI layer of Win95 as well as a VXD Winsock helper which
    interfaces through the Win9x TDI. I mention this because it is another
    source of ‘understanding’ of TDI and how to interact with it.

Good Luck,
Dave Cattley
Consulting Engineer
Systems Software Development

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of MM
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:44 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?

Hello all,

I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on the
subject. I’m more than a little confused by the docs regarding TDI clients
vs TDI drivers and how all this fits together in the network stack.

Thanks,

m

Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

6

“MM” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>> contact Thomas Divine, he may have some samples for licensing.
>
> -Samples are always nice, but those won’t guarantee I understand the model
> correctly. Sample
> code generally causes me to only half way understand something - I
> consider it a hindrance
> most of the time.
>
Get the PCAUSA samples from Thomas Divine as Dan suggested, they will help.

The question of NDIS books has come up over the years, consider that Walter
Oney’s WDM book has sold roughly 30,000 copies and that Walter got 2 bucks a
copy. It took Walter over 18 months to do the book, so he was earning
$40,000 a year. Now consider that NDIS is a specialty subset that would
probably at most be 30% of the market for Walter’s book, the cost of
developing the book will never be realized by the author.

Note, if NDIS and Storage (the other common request for a book) were part of
a standard driver model such as KMDF then I suspect they would be covered in
a book. At least for NDIS, it is possible to write a miniport NDIS/WDM with
less than 20 calls to the NDIS libary. So an extension to the something
like KMDF could be possible.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
http://www.windrvr.com
Remove StopSpam from the email to reply

7

Thanks David,

I think I’m starting to understand what I didn’t earlier. Part of your
response managed to get some gears
turning in my head.

Thanks

matt

David R. Cattley wrote:

Matt,

Do you have some specific goal in mind (TDI client, TDI filter, TDI
transport)?

I recommend that (as Dan suggested) you read the DDK (again, and again, and
again) since it does ‘document’ the interface accurately although I would
hazard to say no one could actually build any of those three types of
drivers armed with just the DDK docs. You need to really understand the TDI
concept of Address (File) Object and Connection (File) Object along with
what a ‘Transport’ is. The DDK is pretty solid on these points.

Samples that have at one-time existed which would be of interest are:

  1. The NT4 DDK (and earlier) had a simple TDI Transport driver sample.
  2. The NT4 IFS Kit had the source for the TDI Client used by the sample
    network redirector.
  3. The MSFT Research web-site provided a download link for the source to
    the ‘research’ TCP/IP V6 stack for NT4/2K which was heavily derived from the
    TCPIP.SYS (IPV4) stack of NT4.
  4. There are some incredibly bad samples floating around of TDI firewall
    filters that are available for download (google will find them). You might
    find, however, a couple of ‘gems’ of detail in them but beware.
  5. I saw a CodeProject posting of a TDI client at one time. It was pretty
    slim and I cannot say as I read through the whole thing. I just noted it.
  6. Thomas Divine (a frequent poster to this list) has a wealth of
    information at www.pcausa.com or www.ndis.com
  7. At one time (and perhaps still) ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winsock
    or something like that had a file VXDTDI.ZIP perhaps? The file had the
    information needed to use TDI on Win95. It contains a document, however,
    about the TDI layer of Win95 as well as a VXD Winsock helper which
    interfaces through the Win9x TDI. I mention this because it is another
    source of ‘understanding’ of TDI and how to interact with it.

Good Luck,
Dave Cattley
Consulting Engineer
Systems Software Development

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of MM
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:44 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] TDI - Book recommendations?

Hello all,

I’m just begining to study TDI. Can anyone recommend a good book on the
subject. I’m more than a little confused by the docs regarding TDI clients
vs TDI drivers and how all this fits together in the network stack.

Thanks,

m

Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

Questions? First check the Kernel Driver FAQ at http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=256

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

8

>The question of NDIS books has come up over the years, consider that Walter

Oney’s WDM book has sold roughly 30,000 copies and that Walter got 2 bucks a
copy. It took Walter over 18 months to do the book, so he was earning
$40,000 a year.

Don,

That might be true. Given your a knowledgeable person in this field, I
would encourage you and others on
this list to write your own short books/manuals. If you could write a
‘field guide’ on a particular driver technology, you
could publish it on demand via cafepress.com and link that too your
site. I’d buy it. $5-7 to print and bind it.

100-150 pages on a specific topic could be done in 2 weeks or less.

I would hope you would entertain the idea…

matt

9

Just so I’ve said it a thousandth time: OSR Press is actively looking to publish one or more books on various niche driver topics, such as networking. The authors will make a LOT more than $2/book (which is pretty typical of the deal given a novice author by a major publisher for a technical book), and we’re set up to handle total sales of even just a few thousand copies.

Peter
OSR

10

Matt,

Unfortunately good writing is hard work, scale back the number of
pages to 30 or so, for 2 or more very full man weeks with review, at least
that is what I have found for the papers I’ve written. I do have some
ideas, that I may look at in the future, but right now the contracting
business is good, and a choice between my rate for a contract or a small
percentage of that for a book is pretty easy.

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
http://www.windrvr.com

“MM” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Don,
>
> That might be true. Given your a knowledgeable person in this field, I
> would encourage you and others on
> this list to write your own short books/manuals. If you could write a
> ‘field guide’ on a particular driver technology, you
> could publish it on demand via cafepress.com and link that too your site.
> I’d buy it. $5-7 to print and bind it.
>
> 100-150 pages on a specific topic could be done in 2 weeks or less.
>
> I would hope you would entertain the idea…
>
> matt
>