As of late Friday afternoon, the University's core routers no longer route IPX network traffic. Whilst this will have no noticable impact to the vast majority of people, it may cause one or two problems for a few people. Most noticeably, it might break certain printers that are attached to Novell print queues.

Users who experience problems that they think may be related to this should contact support@ru.ac.za.

IPX is a legacy network protocol that was once widely used by Novell Netware clients and servers. It has been superceeded by IP in all Novell products and, as a result, there is no reason for us to keep supporting it on our network. In addition, the new switching fabrics installed as part of Friday's upgrade no longer have the capability to support this protocol.

Over the last few months we've migrated all known print servers as well as the few remaining IPX Novell clients on the network to use IP. There are a few dual-stacked clients remaining, but these should detect the change automatically.

IPX will still work at layer two. That is, within an isolated subnet or VLAN it is still possible to use IPX (and there are a few examples of situations like this still on our network). It is no longer possible, however, to connect to these isolated IPX islands from subnets other than the one to which they're directly attached.

Users who experience problems that they think may be related to this should contact support@ru.ac.za.