IP v6  Networking - IPX

Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) is a network layer protocol developed by Novell based on work by Xerox. It uses 80-bit addresses, with 32 bits for the network part of the address and 48 bits for the host part. The host part of the address simply contains the 48-bit Ethernet MAC address, so mapping from an IPX address to an Ethernet address is extremely simple. A host creates an IPX address for itself by taking the network address that routers periodically broadcast and filling in its Ethernet MAC address in the host part of the address. Figure 1-2 shows how an IPX address is created and how the Ethernet MAC address is found in the IPX when required.

When an IPX host wants to communicate with another host, it first checks if the intended correspondent is on the local Ethernet by checking whether the network parts of the local host’s and the remote host’s addresses are the same. If they are, the packet can be transmitted directly to the remote host because it’s connected to the same Ethernet as the local host. If it is not, the packet is sent to a router.

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