News item first announced on May 23, 2003 on the CCSP mailing list:

END OF LIFE ANNOUNCEMENT:
IPX and AppleTalk protocol routing among UIUCnet subnets and Virtual
LANs

CITES Network Engineering plans to phase out the routing of the AppleTalk and IPX protocols between subnets (including VLANs) on May 16, 2004. This will not affect the function of these protocols within a subnet or VLAN, even when the VLAN spans multiple buildings.

There are several reasons why CITES is retiring these protocols on the network core:

1. Modern switching routers process IP packets in hardware while routing other protocols, such as AppleTalk and IPX, in software at a significantly reduced performance and increased CPU load on the backbone equipment. Allowing more of the UIUCnet core devices' work to be done in hardware will allow them to operate more efficiently overall and extend their useful lifetime.
   
   
2. Network Engineering plans to offer fully redundant router connections to the UIUCnet core, allowing networks to continue operating even if parts of the core fail or are taken out of service. There are standard mechanisms for doing this transparently for IP. For other protocols, redundancy is either impossible, would require too much custom configuration to be practical, or would cause backbone traffic to flow across department networks. The prospect of offering redundant service for IP, but not for other protocols (which might be carrying services a department may consider critical) is somewhat ill-advised and would be very difficult to support.
   
   
3. The AppleTalk and IPX protocols are more complex in how they accomplish their tasks because they perform additional functions besides simple packet routing (such as service location and the separation of the network into zones). This adds to the work the core devices must do, increases the potential for bugs, and is more complex to configure and maintain than the IP protocol.

Departments making use of these routed protocols should consider the possible conversion of services offered over the discontinued protocols to those using IP. For example, Apple file servers providing shares using AppleTalk will have to be reconfigured (and user documentation changed) to allow access by using AppleShare-over-IP.

Departments may also need to address the continued use of dated equipment (such as old Novell file servers and old Apple LaserWriter printers) that uses the retired protocols and cannot be upgraded to use IP. Such equipment is already long past its expected lifetime, however, so such retirement or replacement should be considered prudent in any case.

Notes:

• Since it may take departments some time to convert existing services that rely on the IPX or AppleTalk protocols to equivalent IP-based services, these protocols will continue to be routed as-is until the end of the Spring 2004 semester (May 16, 2004).
  
  
• To ease the transition, no new or change requests for IPX/AppleTalk routing will be accepted after June 1, 2003.
  
  
• Finally, we make an appeal to campus network administrators that they request their IPX and/or AppleTalk routing be turned off immediately if it is no longer needed; we suspect it is enabled on many nets purely by legacy and that it is now superfluous.

People who would like to engage someone on an hourly fee basis to help with the transition of their devices from AppleTalk and IPX to IP can contact the CITES OnSite Consulting service (http://onsite.cites.uiuc.edu/).