DFE-650 Series Fast Ethernet PC Card User's Guide
Troubleshooting
39
the above "trial by fire." You are excited about being an
Uncertified Expert. Congratulations! But, you ask: How is a
Certified Expert any different?
The difference is only this: certain items in your short list would be
old friends to the Certified Expert. He or she would have
recognized them by name just as surely as you know your friend's
face when you meet in a crowd. In the example case, the short list
included four items,
LSL, DFE650, IPXODI, and NETX.
The Certified Expert would have recognized NETX as a NetWare
shell module, therefore not the culprit conflicting network driver.
And the Certified Expert would have recognized LSL as most likely
being a link support layer module, which functions in a higher layer
of the communications system, while a hardware-specific network
adapter driver functions in a lower (physical) layer. And the
Certified Expert would have recognized or guessed that the
IPXODI module is a protocol-layer element concerned with the
transmission/reception of NetWare IPX packets by an ODI (Open
Data Interface) network adapter. Thus the Certified Expert would
have known, by a simple process of elimination, that the DFE650
element is the conflicting driver. So the Certified Expert would
have been able to skip the trial and error process, which we needed
to grunt through, in order to know which line of AUTOEXEC.BAT
to cancel.
And here is one more bit of insight. Since the conflicting driver
must be a hardware-specific driver, then it is likely to bear a name
which suggests the model name of the PC Card it serves. The
Certified Expert will be acquainted with a large range of PC Card
products. So he or she will be able to know which element in the
short list has a name which suggests a PC Card model name. Now
you know what lies between you and being a Certified Expert.
