IPX routing through a GRE tunnel

[btrice]

I have a GRE tunnel built between a 1801 router and a 3725. Servers on both ends are running 802.3 encapsulation. If i do a sh ipx servers on the 1801, i see a full listing o of IPX devices throughout the network. The problem im having is, users sitting behind either router can see the servers listed in their explorer and can connect to the servers. They can see the volumnes listed, but can not connect/see contents of the volumnes.

[Edison Ortiz]

Can you post configs from both routers ?

[Richard Burts]

Benji

I agree with Edison that when trying to figure out a problem it is always good to be able to see the config of the devices. But from your description of the situation it sounds to me like the GRE tunnels are working, especially if users at the remote can get lists of the servers. Do the GRE tunnels have IP addresses in addition to the IPX addresses? If so, can you ping from one router to the IP address of the tunnel interface on the other router? In some (newer) versions of IOS you can run CDP over GRE tunnels. If your routers support it I would be interested in whether CDP sees neighbors over the GRE tunnel.

HTH

Rick

[btrice]

Rick and Edison, thanks for your post. I am attaching the configurations. One thing that slipped my mind.....these 2 locations don't connect directly to each other. Each has a T1 back to a seperate 7304 and between the 2 7304s i have fiber. The 3725 is kinda the main location....

[Richard Burts]

Benji

Thanks for posting the configs. I have looked at them and do not see any obvious issue with them.

I note that the tunnels do have IP addresses. So it might be helpful to verify if one router can ping the tunnel address of the other router. Perhaps an even better test, now that I think about it again would be to traceroute from one router to the address of the tunnel on the other router. Make sure that the traceroute gets a response that show the other router is just one hop away.

HTH

Rick

[bhedlund]

Just guessing, but perhaps a IPX mtu setting on the tunnel interface is needed? My IPX knowledge has gotten a little rusty (for good reason) ;)

Brad

[Edison Ortiz]

Are you manually forcing the Windows Client's IPX stack to 802.3 as frame type ?

Based on experience, MS IPX stack on Windows XP does not work quite well on 802.3 mode and prefer 802.2 even after forcing the setting manually.

Also, when IPX is routed, IPX RIP is automatically enabled in the routing process. If you type 'show ipx route' on either router, do you see IPX RIP routes in addition to the IPX EIGRP routes ?

What I've done in the past is creating an IPX RIP process manually and negating the networks under the RIP process.

[btrice]

Customer is using Netware 4.2. I have also psoted the sh ipx route and sh ipx server output from the 2801. It's really weird because they can see basically everything on the network. Even when I do a sh ipx server at another branch that sits behind the 3725 on a T1 or their etherwan, i get the same amount of servers.

[Edison Ortiz]

The frame type issue come into effect when you try to access the server, viewing is another story and that's taken care by SAP.

I assume you have servers at each end of the connection, are they able to exchange directory information without problems ? If so, the problem seems to be at the client side and as I said before, WindowsXP has problems when using 802.3 as the frame type for IPX connections.