Try the site who wrote the IPX protocol
Laura Chappel
http://www.packet-level.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Devdas Bhagat [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 12:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: IPX question
On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, sari sari spewed into the ether:
> I'm just a student, so this is probably a dumb question.
> In a lecture, it was mentioned that ipx was the "older way" oppose
> to ... maybe vpn... i don't remember, but I was wondering what ipx is
> and the benifits of using it over newer options? I remember people on
> this list talking about something with ipx and am curious about
> it...
Hmmm, that makes me feel old ;)
IPX was what Novell boxen used to talk to each other, before the Net
hit Novell and forced them to switch to TCP/IP.
The point of using IPX was merely to use another protocol in the
middle, so that if any attacks werre possible against TCP/IP, the
attacker would not have the capability to decode the IPX packets and
thus would be foiled. This was an early attempt at security through
obscurity, and it may have been moderately successful (Not everyone
could afford a Netware machine, while IP stacks were relatively more
common and IPX stacks were not).
The method used was to send the entire IP packet encapsulated in an IPX
packet., so that the attacker would have to decode the IPX pasket
followed by getting data out of the IP packet.
There were some benefits earlier, but no longer.
Hope this helps.
Devdas Bhagat
--
Don't compare floating point numbers solely for equality.
