Miscellaneous Changes – Several additional changes have been made to support common needs or requests from driver developers or to improve driver integrity.
Remote NDIS is also included as part of the Windows Server 2003 family. Remote NDIS enables the support of USB-attached network devices without the installation of third party drivers. Microsoft supplies the drivers required to communicate with the network devices. This results in easier installation and a lessened chance of system failure because of a poorly built or tested driver.
For more information about NDIS 5.1 and Remote NDIS, see the Windows DDK and the following Web pages:
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http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/network/NDIS51.mspx
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http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/network/rmNDIS.mspx
NDIS can power down network adapters when the system requests a power level change. Either the user or the system can initiate this request. For example, the user may want to put the computer in sleep mode, or the system may request a power level change based on keyboard or mouse inactivity. In addition, disconnecting the network cable can initiate a power-down request if the network interface card (NIC) supports this functionality. In this case, the system waits a configurable time period before powering down the NIC because the disconnect could be the result of temporary wiring changes on the network, rather than the disconnection of a cable from the network device itself.
NDIS power management policy is no network activity–based. This means that all overlying network components must agree to the request before the NIC can be powered down. If there are any active sessions or open files over the network, the power-down request can be refused by any or all of the components involved.
The computer can also be awakened from a lower power state, based on network events. A wakeup signal can be caused by:
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Detection of a change in the network link state (for example, cable reconnect)
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Receipt of a network wakeup frame
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Receipt of a Magic Packet.
At driver initialization, NDIS queries the capabilities of the miniport to determine if it supports such things as Magic Packet, pattern match, or link change wakeups, and to determine the lowest required power state for each wakeup method. The network protocols then query the miniport capabilities. At run time, the protocol sets the wakeup policy, using object identifiers (OIDs), such as Enable Wakeup, Set Packet Pattern, and Remove Packet Pattern.
Currently, TCP/IP is the only Microsoft protocol stack that supports network power management. It registers the following packet patterns at miniport initialization:
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Directed IP packet
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ARP broadcast for the station’s IP address
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NetBIOS over TCP/IP broadcast for the station's assigned computer name
NDIS-compliant drivers are available for a wide variety of NICs from many vendors. The NDIS interface allows multiple protocol drivers of different types to bind to a single NIC driver and allows a single protocol to bind to multiple NIC drivers. The NDIS specification describes the multiplexing mechanism used to accomplish this. Bindings can be viewed or changed as advanced settings from the Network Connections folder.
Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP provides support for the following media types:
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Ethernet (using Ethernet II or IEEE 802.3 Sub-Network Access Protocol [SNAP] encapsulation)
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Fiber Distributed Data Interchange (FDDI)
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Token Ring (IEEE 802.5)
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IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN
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ATM (using LAN emulation [LANE] and Classical IP [CLIP] over ATM)
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Attached Resource Computing Network (ARCnet)
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Dedicated wide area network (WAN) links such as Dataphone Digital Service (DDS) and T-carrier (Fractional T1, T1, T3, E1, and E3)
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Dial-up or permanent circuit-switched WAN services such as analog phone, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), and Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL)
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Packet-switched WAN services such as X.25, Frame Relay, and ATM
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