Establishing an SPX connection

This section discusses the following topics:

• IPX/SPX parameters
• SPX addressing
• Receiving on SPX

IPX/SPX parameters

Please refer to the Microsoft documentation for full details of the use and setting of the NWLink IPX and SPX parameters. The IPX/SPX parameters are in the following paths in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Service\NWLinkSPX\Parameters
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Service\NWLinkIPX\Parameters

SPX addressing

WebSphere MQ uses the SPX address of each machine to establish connectivity. The SPX address is specified in the following form:

        network.node(socket)

where

network

Is the 4-byte network address of the network on which the remote machine resides,

node

Is the 6-byte node address, which is the LAN address of the LAN adapter in the remote machine

socket

Is the 2-byte socket number on which the remote machine will listen.

The default socket number used by WebSphere MQ is 5E86. You can change the default socket number by specifying it in the the Windows NT registry or in the queue manager configuration file qm.ini. If you have taken the default options for installation, the qm.ini file for queue manager OS2 is found in c:\mqm\qmgs\os2. The lines in the Windows NT registry might read:

SPX:
  SOCKET=n

For more information about values you can set in qm.ini, see Appendix C, Configuration file stanzas for distributed queuing.

The SPX address is later specified in the CONNAME parameter of the sender channel definition. If the WebSphere MQ systems being connected reside on the same network, the network address need not be specified. Similarly, if the remote system is listening on the default socket number (5E86), it need not be specified. A fully qualified SPX address in the CONNAME parameter would be:

 CONNAME('network.node(socket)')

but if the systems reside on the same network and the default socket number is used, the parameter would be:

 CONNAME(node)

A detailed example of the channel configuration parameters is given in WebSphere MQ for Windows configuration.

Receiving on SPX

Receiving channel programs are started in response to a startup request from the sending channel. To do this, a listener program has to be started to detect incoming network requests and start the associated channel.

You should use the WebSphere MQ listener.

Using the WebSphere MQ listener

To run the Listener supplied with WebSphere MQ, that starts new channels as threads, use the RUNMQLSR command. For example:

RUNMQLSR -t spx

Optionally you may specify the queue manager name or the socket number if you are not using the defaults.