Installation guide

280 Installation Guide for Clients
Monolithic Drivers
The only monolithic driver supplied with LAN Manager 2.2 is a
loopback driver, which you use to run LAN Manager without a network
adapter. Available only with OS/2, this driver enables a single computer
to emulate network operations without actually being connected to a
network. It allows network requests to be sent to the local machine as if
the machine were remote. This transmission can be done on a real
network, but the operation is much faster with the loopback driver,
because it avoids the time required to actually send the message over a
network and receive it back.
An application often routes local-data access through the LAN Manager
software to allow the server to arbitrate data access and access
permissions. The loopback driver enables this routing to be done with
the highest performance. The loopback network is treated differently
from other networks: it is searched first when using remote resources
and is ignored by most messaging functions. This driver has no
configuration options and does not appear in the LAN Manager
PROTOCOL.INI file. However, it does count toward LAN Manager’s
maximum of 12 networks. Its filename is LOOPDRV.OS2.