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IPX Tunnelling over IP WAN

5ncamden
Level 1
Level 1

I want to send IPX data between two end LAN's over an MPLS (IP only) WAN. I figure I need to create a GRE tunnel and send data over it. I don't want to add the overhead of IPSEC encrpytion (or any encryption) as the WAN links are all Private anyway. Can someone point me to any config examples, as all the ones I have found include IPSEC encryption. This will be router-router, no NAT or firewalls involved...

3 Replies 3

jcsm1th
Level 1
Level 1

Assuming this is just from one site to another it should be pretty straight forward. The GRE Tunnel (in this case) will act just like any other interface you would enable IPX on. We had a similiar situation we fixed with Tunnels across our IP only core. The complexity grows if you want to start linking multiple sites together. At that point you need to add a tunnel for each site to every other site (full mesh). This can get very complex very quickly.

Here is an example of what your Tunnel interface may look like. We tweaked the IPX timers to limit the IPX traffic traversing the IP core between sites. Depending on your situation this may or may not be helpful.

Interface Tunnel<#>

no ip address

ipx delay 1

ipx network

ipx output-rip-delay 1000

ipx output-sap-delay 1000

ipx update interval rip 1200

ipx update interval sap 1200

tunnel source

tunnel destination

Obviously you will need to enable IPX on the router in question and the appropriate interfaces in your lan.

Thanks jcsm1th!

I wasn't sure if it was really that simple... Does creating the Tunnel Interface and giving it an IPX address automatically tell it to encapsulate the IPX as IP ??

I was expecting there to be some other command in there as well as the tunnel config...

Neil.

Yep, that is all you should need.

The router will take the packet, add a GRE Header (about 24 bytes I believe) add an IP header and send it on it's way to the destination address using the source IP address of the tunnel source interface.

You can use "show IPX interface " along with any other relevant "show IPX" commands once complete.

Happy tunneling

Jason

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