Flight Plan for Migrating From IPX to IP
April 19, 1999
By James E. Drews
Your IS team has decided to take advantage of some of the benefits of NetWare 5. One goal is to reduce network-protocol usage to a single protocol--IP--thus drastically simplifying your protocol management on routers. (Of course, this assumes you don't have Macintosh workstations using your NetWare servers--support for AppleShareIP will come from Prosoft Engineering later this year.)
There are a number of things you should consider before undertaking the challenging migration to IP. For instance, determine if a total conversion to TCP/IP is really your goal. Perhaps a mixed environment is acceptable, with TCP/IP as the only protocol running on the network's backbone. If your intention is to eliminate IPX traffic on the backbone, the work will be done at the server level.
Preparing for the Migration Before you begin to make this shift, take a look at the applications that are used on your network. Do some require IPX? For most applications that are not NetWare-aware, it makes no difference what protocol is used on the clients, but a few applications are dependent on certain protocols. For example, Novell's RCONSOLE must use IPX/SPX to communicate with the server. Therefore, in an IP-only network, the application must be either upgraded or eliminated. A Migration Agent will let applications such as RCONSOLE run on an IP network, but to have a pure IP network, these applications must be replaced. In the case of RCONSOLE, there also is a Java version using IP that ships with NetWare 5.
It may not be easy to tell if an application depends on IPX. If it uses SAP (Service Advertising Protocol) or Bindery scanning to locate services, it probably will not work in a pure IP environment. An application that uses only NCP (NetWare Core Protocol) to communicate with the servers should be able to work in an IP-only environment.
You also need to consider your printing environment. At the Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we rely heavily on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP JetDirect cards to service our NetWare print queues. Some older versions of these cards are unable to support TCP/IP. Even with the newer versions, you must find a different way to move print jobs from the queue to the printer if you want to eliminate IPX traffic. This typically would be done with a program that can send jobs to the printer with the LPR protocol. Client workstations could print directly to the printers via LPR. If no LPR client exists for your workstations, you can install Unix Print Services for NetWare or move to NDPS (Novell Distributed Print Services) version 2 on your NetWare servers.
Finally, you need to inspect your network infrastructure. Check to see if your routers will support IP Multicast. With an all-TCP/IP network, NetWare will use the SLP (Service Location Protocol) to locate services. SLP, based on RFC 2165, uses multicast to discover SLP agents and services.
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