CCNA Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide - FTP Server

IPX Addressing
Introduction to Novell IPX 395
1/18 of a second it takes to get to a remote network. This is IPX’s way of
using link delay to find the best way to a remote network.
There are only three routers in this example, and this packet is sent out
every 60 seconds—imagine this happening on a large network with hundreds
of routers!
After sweating through IP addressing, IPX addressing should seem like a day
at the beach. The IPX addressing scheme has several features that make it a
lot easier to understand and administer than the TCP/IP scheme is.
IPX addresses use 80 bits, or 10 bytes, of data. As with TCP/IP addresses,
they are hierarchical and divided into a network and node portion. The first
four bytes always represent the network address, and the last six bytes
always represent the node address. There’s none of that Class A, Class B, or
Class C TCP/IP stuff in IPX addressing—the network and node portions of
the address are always the same lengths. After subnet masking, this is sweet
indeed!
Just as with IP network addresses, the network portion of the address is
assigned by administrators and must be unique on the entire IPX internetwork.
Node addresses are automatically assigned to every node. In most
cases, the MAC address of the machine is used as the node portion of the
address. This offers several notable advantages over TCP/IP addressing.
Since client addressing is dynamic (automatic), you don’t have to run DHCP
or manually configure each individual workstation with an IPX address.
Also, since the hardware address (layer 2) is included as part of the software
address (layer 3), there’s no need for a TCP/IPARP equivalent in IPX.
As with TCP/IP addresses, IPX addresses can be written in several formats.
Most often, though, they’re written in hex, such as
00007C80.0000.8609.33E9.
The first eight hex digits (00007C80) represent the network portion of the
address. It’s a common IPX custom when referring to the IPX network to
drop leading 0s. Thus, the above network address would be referred to as
IPX network 7C80.
The remaining 12 hex digits (0000.8609.33E9) represent the node portion
and are commonly divided into three sections of four hex digits divided
by periods. They are the MAC address of the workstation.