The IPX (Novell Netware) protocol will be retired from the campus network on July 31 2003. At that time, OIT will reconfigure the campus network to stop routing IPX traffic.
IPX is an old networking protocol, popular in the past for communicating among PCs running DOS and older versions of Windows, and for printing from such devices. At Princeton, IPX has been supplanted by IP-based protocols (e.g. NetBIOS-over-IP).
For a number of years, University departments have been replacing old IPX-based servers with IP-based servers. OIT plans to finish migrating the last of its IPX-based servers before July 31 2003.
Many customer devices (especially printers and Windows systems) are still configured to speak IPX in addition to IP. We recommend that customers turn off IPX on these devices. Doing so will both save their device from handling the unecessary protocol, and will reduce unecessary network traffic.