Network byte ordering

Some of the fields in packet headers are byte order sensitive;

the data must be sent in high-to-low order. Figure 4-1, ``Byte order'' illustrates this.

Figure 4-1 Byte order

You must account for this byte order when writing an application that communicates with an unknown machine type. For example, if an application running on an Intel® 80386 CPU does a t_sndudata, the data portion of the IPX packet is sent over the wire in 80386 (low-to-high) order. This presents a problem if the receiving CPU (for example, a Motorola® 68030) does not use the same low-to-high byte order.