| We put the IPX switch feature in there so as to accommodate
those customers who have a substantial Novell environment and
had the mindset of not wanting to change/touch their network
as long as they perceived that everything was working fine.
Even though these customers were told that even Novell has
admitted that their raw IPX mode didn't allow for proper
encapsulation and translation of SNAP FDDI frames. and the
customers didn't want to change something that they perceived
didn't need changing. So, we provided the option in a release
about a year ago, as it was documented that there was a substantial
amount of Novell business where they had the "if it ain't broke
don't fix it" mindset. We didn't want to see this business lost
to the competition so we provided the optional feature.
There was a very long, dragged out discussion in here back in the
94-95 winter time frame about the merits of this, and it was simply
a matter of the field providing the dollars impact of having the
feature to the level of management that makes the decisions. Having
done that the feature was ok'ed to be added to the wave 3 release
last spring. So the bottom line is that the RAW 802.3 IPX packet
format only allows for communication between Novell environment
client/server stations that have the raw ipx mode enabled.
Bob
|