Compatible Systems 5.4 Manuale Utente

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Appendices
283
network cable segment. It may sometimes be desirable for redundancy to 
have several seed routers on a segment. This is acceptable as long as all seed 
routers on the segment are seeding the same network number.
Service Advertising Protocol
Routers participate in allowing end nodes to access IPX services (such as file 
servers, print servers, communications servers, etc.) by keeping a list of all of 
the services on an IPX internetwork. This list is maintained by examining the 
Service Advertising Protocol (SAP) packets which are sent by servers and 
other routers on the local segment, and by rebroadcasting this information out 
of their other interfaces.
A “split-horizon” technique is used so that routers do not duplicate informa-
tion which is already known on the segment being broadcast to.
Client Machine Addressing
Unlike TCP/IP, IPX workstations do not have fixed network/node addresses 
that need to be configured. Instead, a workstation gets its network number 
from the router(s) on the segment it is connected to, and uses its Ethernet 
address for its node number.
This means that an IPX workstation may have as much as 18 hexadecimal 
digits of network/node address. Fortunately for workstation users, the 
NetWare client software does the work of discovering the network number 
and setting the address. Users only need to install Novell drivers to be able to 
use the IPX protocols over their network.
Routers which support IPX can use any of four “frame types” to send IPX 
packets. Each frame type organizes the IPX information in a network packet 
(i.e. frame) in a slightly different fashion. Although the basic information 
may be the same, clients or servers using different frame types cannot 
communicate with each other without an intermediate translation occurring 
between frame types. This translation is called “transitional routing,” and is 
one of the functions that can be performed by routers.
The four IPX frame types are:
Ethernet_Type_II
Ethernet_802.3 (Raw)
Ethernet_802.2
Ethernet_SNAP
Older versions of NetWare defaulted to the 802.3 Raw frame type, whereas 
NetWare 4.0 uses the 802.2 frame type.