I just returned from a four day networking class. The old Ethereal software has been replaced with Wireshark. So, I have installed the latest version on my Mac and am now just watching broadcast traffic, to get a feel for what is going on with our network.
First thing I found is that some of our printers were broadcasting Novell (IPX) stuff. We’re not running any Novell stuff, so I turned this off. Next, I found a bunch of packets that looked like this:
234 0.07334 65369.1 0.255 ZIP GetNetInfo Request
I now know that these are Appletalk packets and we don’t need to be broadcasting them. After I while, I found that the offending device was an old Netgear print server. I logged into the print server, but couldn’t find a way to turn off Appletalk. So, when I get some time, I’ll just attach the printer directly to the user’s computer and take it off the network. I don’t think that it’s necessary for this printer to be networked.