Книга: Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

Configuring an IPX Router

You will recall from our short discussion of the protocols used in an IPX environment that IPX is a routable protocol and that the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is used to propagate routing information. The IPX version of RIP is quite similar to the IP version. They operate in essentially the same way; routers periodically broadcast the contents of their routing tables and other routers learn of them by listening and integrating the information they receive. Hosts need only know who their local network is and be sure to send datagrams for all other destinations via their local router. The router is responsible for carrying these datagrams and forwarding them on to the next hop in the route.

In an IPX environment, a second class of information must be propagated around the network. The Service Advertisement Protocol (SAP) carries information relating to which services are available at which hosts around the network. It is the SAP protocol, for example, that allows users to obtain lists of file or print servers on the network. The SAP protocol works by having hosts that provide services periodically broadcast the list of services they offer. The IPX network routers collect this information and propagate it throughout the network alongside the network routing information. To be a compliant IPX router, you must propagate both RIP and SAP information.

Just like IP, IPX on Linux provides a routing daemon named ipxd to perform the tasks associated with managing routing. Again, just as with IP, it is actually the kernel that manages the forwarding of datagrams between IPX network interfaces, but it performs this according to a set of rules called the IPX routing table. The ipxd daemon keeps that set of rules up to date by listening on each of the active network interfaces and analyzing when a routing change is necessary. The ipxd daemon also answers requests from hosts on a directly connected network that ask for routing information.

The ipxd command is available prepackaged in some distributions, and in source form by anonymous FTP from http://metalab.unc.edu/ in the /pub/Linux/system/filesystems/ncpfs/ipxripd-x.xx.tgz file.

No configuration is necessary for the ipxd daemon. When it starts, it automatically manages routing among the IPX devices that have been configured. The key is to ensure that you have your IPX devices configured correctly using the ipx_interface command before you start ipxd. While auto-detection may work, when you're performing a routing function it's best not to take chances, so manually configure the interfaces and save yourself the pain of nasty routing problems. Every 30 seconds, ipxd rediscovers all of the locally attached IPX networks and automatically manages them. This provides a means of managing networks on interfaces that may not be active all of the time, such as PPP interfaces.

The ipxd would normally be started at boot time from an rc boot script like this:

# /usr/sbin/ipxd

No & character is necessary because ipxd will move itself into the background by default. While the ipxd daemon is most useful on machines acting as IPX routers, it is also useful to hosts on segments where there are multiple routers present. When you specify the -p argument, ipxd will act passively, listening to routing information from the segment and updating the routing tables, but it will not transmit any routing information. This way, a host can keep its routing tables up to date without having to request routes each time it wants to contact a remote host.

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