CCNA Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide - FTP Server

Most network administrators have, at some point, encountered
IPX for two reasons: first, Novell NetWare uses IPX as its default protocol;
second, it was the most popular network operating system during
the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, millions of IPX networks have
been installed. But Novell is changing things with the release of NetWare 5.
TCP/IP is now the default communications protocol instead of IPX,
although Novell still supports IPX. Why do they still bother? Well, considering
the multitude of installed IPX clients and servers, it would be pretty
impractical to yank the support for it.
There’s little doubt that IPX will be around for a while so it’s no surprise
that the Cisco IOS provides full support for large IPX internetworks. But to
really take advantage of Novell IPX’s functions and features, we need to
review the way it operates and handles addressing because it varies significantly
from the TCP/IP method we covered earlier. Armed with a solid grasp
of things IPX, we’ll then explore the configuration of IPX in the Cisco IOS
and, from there, cover the monitoring of IPX traffic.
Introduction to Novell IPX
Novell IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange) has been in use since its
release in the early 1980s. It’s quite similar to XNS (Xerox Network Systems),
which was developed by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the
1960s; it even shares a likeness with TCP/IP. IPX is really a family of protocols
that coexist and interact to empower sound network communications.