Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:08:22 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: yves@CC.McGill.CA Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD routes IPX, what about this? Message-ID: <199610232108.OAA10445@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199610231830.OAA01616@maelstrom.CC.McGill.CA> from "Yves Lepage" at Oct 23, 96 02:30:12 pm
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> FreeBSD routes IPX. > > I've not tried it yet but I trust that it works. What about if I tried > to forward IPX traffic onto an IP interface as IP traffic? and forward > IP traffic onto an IPX interface as IPX traffic? > > Does the IPX code in FreeBSD currently do that conversion? > > The application for this would be to provide MBONE (rumours have it > that there is such a thing as IPX mcast) to PC's behind Novell servers. > These PC's are without IP connectivity... I suspect that you want IPX tunneling instead of IPX forwarding. The IPX use of "NetWare/IP" is actually a tunneling implementation, not a real native NCP/IP implementation of NCP/IPX. In other words, NetWare/IP encapsulates instead of forwards, itself (the marketing claims are bogus). For Multicast, there may be IPX multicast coming on line. I don't know how it would work, given how router hopping works in NetWare. For Multicast support of IPX clients, you would be better served (I think) to establish IPX encapsulation of the multicast protocol to the FreeBSD box, and proxy the MBONE connection as a regular IP connection there. This means that you can't really expect to support a lot of IPX clients through your gateway. Alternately, you should contact Novell about IPX multicast, and pound a translation mechaism in as a dual protocol listener/repeater (not router) for the multicast protocol you are interested in. I'm not sure, but I know Amancio Hasty, at least, was running a "virtual mbone" using IP/IP tunneling, which would be similar to my IPX encapsulation suggestion (above). There are a number of issues in implementing an IPX server on an IPX host; the biggest has to be SAP broadcasting the server's existance. Even then, you are talking about 3.x advertisement. For 4.x directory services, you are probably out of luck until NetWare for UNIX (NWU) is ported to FreeBSD. Given that they use a stack mux for hot thread scheduling (I was involved in the design), this probably won't happen until FreeBSD has Streams support -- well after the Linux port). One fix might be if Novel provides an external interface for LDAP (Light weight Directory Access Protocol), which they are supposedly doing. There is already an LDAP implementation for FreeBSD (search for LDAP on Yahoo to find it). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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