Transitioning from Novell to IP

[klindauer]

Hi..

I have just picked up a department that wants to transition from Novell to IP. Their Novell network sits in a /30 with only two hosts, a gateway and firewall. All 40+ clients underneath the firewall talk IPX. We have been given a new /24 address space to put these clients on, but we want to transition these machines slowly. This new address space will be on different interfaces on the same router as the old address space.

The wrinkle is this: our university administers the router and will not turn on IPX routing between the two interfaces on the router. But we still want to slowly transition these hosts one by one from Novell to IP, while still keeping vulnerable hosts like their Novell fileserver behind the current firewall until we move that over to a new Windows 2k domain.

We, do have a 4224 which we had replaced by another unit and is just taking up space for the time being. Since the 4224 does do some layer 2, do you think it would be possible to use the 4224 as a bridge between the two IP subnets, passing only IPX between them during our transition, while isolating the IP traffic? If so, has anybody done this? Does anybody have a sample config?

Thanks in advance,

Karl

[vkapoor5]

I am not using this product, but I believe the 4224 can route IP and IPX between different vlans, apart from functioning as a plain Layer-2 switch. So you could create switched virtual interfaces (SVI) for each vlan, which could then be used for routing IP or IPX between different vlans without the need for an external router. The SVIs act as a routed interface belonging to the respective vlans, For eg., if you have vlans 100 and 200 defined on the switch with hosts belonging to these vlans, then you can create 'int vlan 100' and 'int vlan 200' on the switch, assign them an IP address belonging to each vlan, turn on IP routing. The 4224 will then route IP between these vlans. You can similary configure IPX addresses on these SVIs and enable IPX routing on the switch to route IPX between vlans. If the switch also supports bridging between vlans (which I am not sure), just like on a router, you can turn on bridging on these SVIs so that you can route and bridge whatever protocols you want. Since these configurations are similar to that of Cat 6500, you can refer to that documentation to configure the 4224.

[rjackson]

I dont quite follow if the ipx network is on the router yet. You said there is a gateway and firewall. I would assume the gateway is some box to convert ipx to IP for internet access. Is the router in the picture now?

Just leave the pcs where they are. You can add the new address space to the same segment and have them point to the router for their gateway as they convert to IP. If necesary you can use a secondary address on the router to put both IP address spaces on the same router interface.