Reminder: IPX and Appletalk backbone routing will be terminated tomorrow.
A copy of the original announcement, dated April 1, is attached.

Doug

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To all interested parties:

*****  IPX and Appletalk Routing to be Terminated:  May 11, 2005  *****


Note:  A copy of this message may be found at:

http://network.msu.edu/public/ipx-appletalk-routing.html


As of Wednesday, May 11, 2005, the campus backbone network will be
reconfigured to no longer handle Novell IPX or Appletalk routing.
After that time, only IP routing will be carried across the campus
backbone.

This change is necessary as we move forward to new network architectures.
Several of the motivating factors for this change include:

  *  The increased use of and need for firewalls.

  *  The anticipated rollout of network intrusion detection and
     prevention devices.

  *  Backbone network upgrade from 1 Gbps (1 Gigabit = 1 billion bits
     per second) to 10 Gbps (10 billion bits per second).

Each of these technologies work with IP networking only, and do not
have provisions to accomodate native Novell IPX or Appletalk routing.


Note:  IPX and Appletalk routing will continue to work as it does today,
within a campus building.  No immediate changes are anticipated which
would affect internal IPX or Appletalk operations.


Background
----------

IP networking has long been a standard, both for the Internet at large,
and for the MSU campus network.  The routing of other protocols, such
as Novell IPX and Appletalk, date back to the earliest days of the
campus-wide Ethernet network system, over 15 years ago.  At that time,
MSU adopted a multi-protocol model for the campus backbone network.
Since then, IP networking has become the predominant and virtually
exclusive networking protocol.

The changes to eliminate IPX and Appletalk routing on the backbone may
impact a number of users and services.  We believe, though, that all
such services can be made available across the IP backbone, with
appropriate configuration or software changes.  Both Novell and Apple
have added features to their operating systems to allow carrying their
traffic across an IP backbone, and these features have been available
for a number of years.

For further assistance
----------------------

If you have any concerns about this network change, please let me know.

If you need assistance with making the necessary changes, please contact
your departmental IT staff.  IT staff may wish to make queries on the
MSUNAG mailing list (http://network.msu.edu/public/msunag.html) for
additional assistance.


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Doug Nelson, Network Manager             |  [log in to unmask]
Academic Computing and Network Services  |  Ph: (517) 353-2980
Michigan State University                |  http://www.msu.edu/~nelson/