> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Adam)
> Date: Tue 19 Jun, 2001
> Subject: Re: Query: How to tell if Microsoft is using BSD TCP/IP code?
> An article over on www.Kuro5hin.org by a someone who claims
> to be a former MS employee describes the stack used in NT back
> in the early 90's as code which was liscensed from a company
> called 'Spider'.
Correct. Spider Systems in those days; that product (SpiderTCP)
is still sold by Spider Software <http://www.spider.com>, primarily
targetted at embedded systems. (I was [EMAIL PROTECTED] for quite a
while, since the days I was spider!mark...)
> In the comp.unix.admin archives I found a post
> which references Spider QNIX as a *nix variant so I'm pretty
> sure this is who the article is referencing.
Hmm, that's a bit muddled. A major Spider customer did use
QNX (and still does), but that's not a Spider product (see
<http://www.qnx.com>), just a supported (and neat) platform.
> Anyway this code
> in turn was pulled from BSD back in the day...
No. The core SpiderTCP protocol implementation is _not_ derived
from BSD. Some of the utilities which were added as the product
was developed came from Net/1 or Net/2 (hence the FTP.EXE copyright
string), but others such as route and netstat were written from
scratch, and the BSD utilities were modified to work over TLI and
STREAMS (SpiderTCP is a STREAMS implementation, which is why
NT had STREAMS at least until 4.0; they also used it for their OSI
and X.500 implementation, even though that was not Spider's).
The STREAMS TCP/IP implementation was later replaced (the way
Microsoft wedged SpiderSTREAMS into NT was not pretty), but large
chunks of the utilities remain.
> "...Along with Spider's stack came versions of various
> TCP/IP-related utility programs, such as ftp, rcp and
> rsh. Those were ported from BSD sockets to winsock (not
> a huge change) and bundled with NT."
Near enough. The SpiderTCP utilities still had sockets support
(NOTE: this was never sockets over TLI like the stuff some UNIX
vendors bought from a Spider competitor!) and -DNO_TLI should
have worked, but that TLI code is _still_ there in FTP.EXE!
SpiderTCP sockets used an old BSD API, but was a rewrite to work
over a kernel STREAMS socket interface to the kernel TCP/IP drivers.
> I don't know how much faith you can put in it, but its an
> interesting read. I found the following snippet to be
> quite curious...
>
> "And implying that the TCP/IP stack uses BSD code is also
> false. As I said above there may be small vestiges of it
> in there, although I doubt it.
I can't confirm thatt, but I suspect there's very little, if any,
SpiderTCP code left in the TCP/IP drivers after the rewrite, and
all other TCP/IP vendors of note in that market would have been
using BSD derived code (even those selling STREAMS implementations,
though they tended to be less modular than Spider's product).
Cheers,
mark.
--
Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>
"Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses
"We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD
-- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com> <http://www.freebsd.org>
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
