Configuring IPX Interfaces
Just as with TCP/IP, you must configure your IPX interfaces before you can use them. The IPX protocol has some unique requirements; consequently, a special set of configuration tools was developed. We will use these tools to configure our IPX interfaces and routes.
Network Devices Supporting IPX
The IPX protocol assumes that any collection of hosts that can
transmit datagrams to each other without routing belong to the same
IPX network. All hosts belonging to a single Ethernet segment would
all belong to the same IPX network. Similarly (but less intuitively),
both hosts supporting a PPP-based serial link must belong to the IPX
network that is the serial link itself. In an Ethernet environment,
there are a number of different frame types that may be used to carry
IPX datagrams. The frame types represent different Ethernet protocols
and describe differing ways of carrying multiple protocols on the same
Ethernet network. The most common frame types you will encounter are
802.2
and ethernet_II
. We’ll
talk more about frame types in the next section.
The Linux network devices that currently support the IPX protocol are the Ethernet and PPP drivers. The Ethernet or PPP interface must be active before it can be configured for IPX use. Typically, you configure an Ethernet device with both IP and IPX, so the device already exists, but if your network is IPX only, you need to use the ifconfig to change the Ethernet device status to the following:
# ifconfig eth0 up ...
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