September 12, 2006 - Some of you may be familiar with "PCAGizmo", a NDIS
filtering driver that is designed to log NDIS OIDs exchanged between Windows
system components and the lower-level miniports.

In the past the information logged by PCAGizmo has been particularly useful
to developers interested observing OID_802_11_XYZ transactions to better
understand how the system interacts with 802.11 adapters.

The previous PCAGizmo tool installed a NDIS 5 Intermediate (IM) driver to
filter and log NDIS OID and status operations.

PCAUSA has (finally...) added support for Windows Vista.

On Windows Vista PCAGizmo installs a NDIS 6 Lightweight Filter (LWF)
monitoring driver. A NDIS 6 LWF driver can be installed both above and below
other NDIS filter drivers. Of particular interest, the PCAGizmo LWF can be
installed below the Vista system Native Wi-Fi LAN Emulation IM driver. In
this position PCAGizmo can log the OID_DOT11_XYZ transactions associated
with the new Vista Native Wi-Fi facility.

As a historical note, PCAGizmo was initially developed in 2003 as an NDIS 6
experimental driver. It initially breathed life and was partially debugged
at DevCon 2003, and was probably one of the first NDIS 6 LWF drivers
developed outside of Microsoft. Of course, the earliest versions of PCAGizmo
didn't actually do much because the earliest NDIS 6 components didn't do
much either...

Sample logs from the new PCAGizmo NDIS OID tracing tool can be found at the
URL:

http://ndis.com/papers/802_11_logs/PCAGizmo_Wireless_OID_Logs.htm

I may post a link to download the new PCAGizmo executables in the near
future if there is interest.

Regards,

Thomas F. Divine