NCP Protocol Independence | Upgrading and Repairing Networks (5th Edition)

The NetWare 5 operating system is NCP protocol independent, which means that internal to NetWare, the NCPs can make and receive specific requests for services that are handled by IP, IPX, UDP, or a combination of these protocols.

To see which protocols NetWare loads and in what order it loads them, you can use several NetWare 5 console commands and SET parameters. The server console commands that are NCP-specific include these commands:

NCP STATS
NCP ADDRESSES
NCP TRACE
NCP DUMP

To see which IPX, TCP, and UDP addresses are loading and in which order, you can go to the server prompt, type NCP ADDRESSES , and press Enter. The resulting list shows the order that the AUTOEXEC.NCF or the NetWare Configuration file loaded the protocols. For instance, maybe you thought you were loading the IP address before IPX but you see that IPX is loading before IP. You can use the SET parameter to change their designated order, regardless of which protocol you bind first through the AUTOEXEC.NCF file or through the NetWare Configuration file. To do this, follow these steps:

In the MONITOR utility, select the Server Parameters option from the Available Options window.
Select the NCP option, highlight the NCP Protocol Preferences, and press the Enter key.
Use the SET command to specify the order in which you want the incoming service requests to use these protocols. After you save this configuration, the NetWare Configuration file contains this information and uses it each time you bring up the server. The syntax for the SET parameters is as follows :
```
 SET NCP EXCLUDE IP ADDRESSES =  decimal IP address  
```
and
```
 SET NCP INCLUDE IP ADDRESSES =  decimal IP address  
```

You should note that the exclusions take precedence over the inclusions. That means if you have the same address as both an exclude and an include, the server will exclude it, regardless of the order in which you entered the parameters. However, you do not need to both include the NCP interface and exclude the non-NCP interface. One or the other will work. You can enter the parameters at the server console, in AUTOEXEC.NCF , or in Monitor under Server Parameters, NCP.

As a practical example of the preceding steps, say you have a server with IP bound to two interfaces and one of them goes to the Internet. You might want to disable NCP traffic over the Internet interface for security reasons. The fictional IP address for the public interface is 200.100.50.25 and the internal interface is 10.20.30.40. To disable NCP on the Internet interface, you can use either of the following SET parameters:

 SET NCP EXCLUDE IP ADDRESSES = 200.100.50.25

 SET NCP INCLUDE IP ADDRESSES = 10.20.30.40.

NCP chooses the first protocol bound as the preferred protocol it uses. If both IP and IPX are boundcurrently without any default value insertedand both are installed on a server, NCP defaults to use IPX because IPX loads first. The set parameterNCP Protocol Preferencesneeds to be set to "NCP Protocol Preferences = TCPIP" so that IP is the preferred protocol used by NetWare 5.