Linux IPX HOWTO

7. Greg Pages IPX tools.

Greg Page <greg at caldera.com of Caldera Incorporated has written a suite of IPX configuration tools and enhanced the Linux IPX kernel support.

The kernel enhancements allow linux to be configured as a fully featured IPX bridge or router. The enhanced IPX support has already been fed back into the mainstream kernel distribution so you will probably already have it.

The network configuration tools provide you with the capability to configure your network devices to support IPX and allow you to configure IPX routing and other facilities under Linux. The Linux IPX network tools are available from: sunsite.unc.edu.

7.1 The IPX tools in more detail.

ipx_interface

This command is used to manually add, delete or check ipx capability to an existing network device. Normally the network device would be an Ethernet device such at eth0. At least one IPX interface must be designated the primary interface and the -p flag to this command does this. For example to enable Ethernet device eth0 for IPX capability as the primary IPX interface using the IEEE 802.2 frame type and IPX network address 39ab0222 you would use:

# ipx_interface add -p eth0 802.2 0x39ab0222

If the frame type differs from NetWare(tm) servers on this network, they will studiously ignore you. If the frame type is correct but the network number differs, they will still ignore you but complain frequently on the NetWare server console. The latter is guaranteed to gain you flames from your NetWare administrator and may disrupt existing NetWare clients.

If you get an error while running this program and you happen to not have already configured tcp/ip, then you will find that you need to manually start the eth0 interface using the command:

# ifconfig eth0 up

ipx_configure

This command enables or disables the automatic setting of the interface configuration and primary interface settings.

--auto_interface

allows you to select whether new network devices should be automatically configured as IPX devices or not.

--auto_primary

allows you to select whether the IPX software should automatically select a primary interface or not. Problems have been noted using this with Windows 95 clients on the network.

A typical example would be to enable both automatic interface configuration and automatic primary interface setting with the following command:

# ipx_configure --auto_interface=on --auto_primary=on

ipx_internal_net

This command allows you to configure or deconfigure an internal network address. An internal network address is optional, but when it is configured it will always be the primary interface. To configure an IPX network address of ab000000 on IPX node 1 you would use:

# ipx_internal_net add 0xab000000 1

ipx_route

The command allows you to manually modify the IPX routing table. For example to add a route to IPX network 39ab0222 via a router with node number 00608CC33C0F on IPX network 39ab0108:

# ipx_route add 0x39ab0222 0x39ab0108 0x00608CC33C0F