[ale] Virtual networks

[Phil Turmel]

On 05/20/2015 08:00 PM, Dustin Strickland wrote:
> I've been meaning to follow up on this -- my "project" time is somewhat
> limited so any time I've made progress on this I've had to drop what I
> was doing to take care of more pressing matters... In any event, after
> making my own config that didn't work, I basically c+p'd yours, which
> also didn't work. After some poking around I found I had to set up NAT,
> and that was the last piece of the puzzle.

I don't, as my OpenVPN server is also my office's public router, and it
knows all of the private subnet routes.  All the clients get the
encompassing /20 route to make everything good.

> Thanks for your feedback everyone, and sorry for my misleading
> description -- I honestly wasn't aware that my "virtual network" wasn't
> a "virtual network". As an aside, I can understand the "virtual switch"
> model, but if it's all virtual, is it not a VLAN, or...?

I didn't catch the nuance right away, either.  Anyways, 'VLAN' generally
describes tagging packets with additional headers to emulate multiple
independent circuits within a single real circuit.  Commonly using
802.1q, an ethernet layer 2 feature, justifying the "L" in VLAN.

vSwitch technology is orthogonal -- a virtual switch in a hypervisor may
or may not also do VLAN tagging, and may or may not be connected to a
real network.  I set up an isolated vswitch in my laptop when I access
XP VMs that I ocassionally need to use (getting rarer, thankfully).

The term "virtual network" is vague enough to cover both.

HTH,

Phil