NetWare Core Protocol

The NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) is a network protocol used in some products from Novell, Inc. It is usually associated with the client-server operating system Novell NetWare which originally supported primarily MS-DOS client stations, but later support for other platforms such as Microsoft Windows, the classic Mac OS, Linux, Windows NT, Mac OS X, and various flavors of Unix was added. The NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) is a network protocol used in some products from Novell, Inc. It is usually associated with the client-server operating system Novell NetWare which originally supported primarily MS-DOS client stations, but later support for other platforms such as Microsoft Windows, the classic Mac OS, Linux, Windows NT, Mac OS X, and various flavors of Unix was added. The NCP is used to access file, print, directory, clock synchronization, messaging, remote command execution and other network service functions. It originally took advantage of an easy network configuration and a little memory footprint of the IPX/SPX protocol stack. Since mid-1990s the TCP/IP implementation is available. Novell eDirectory uses NCP for synchronizing data changes between the servers in a directory service tree. The original IPX/SPX implementation was provided only for Novell NetWare platform and now is obsolete. The TCP/IP implementation uses TCP/UDP port 524 and relies on SLP for name resolution. For NCP operation in IPX/SPX networks the bare IPX protocol was used with Packet Type field set to 17. On the workstation (client station) side the IPX socket number of 0x4003 was used, on the server side the socket number of 0x0451. The NCP PDU has the following structure: