When connected to a properly configured network device, your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 system can communicate over a network using 802.1q Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tagged frames. The necessary kernel module,
8021q, is already available in the 2.4 kernel.
To use tagged traffic exclusively, create additional
ifcfg-ethX.Y files, where X is the interface on which you will use the VLAN and Y is the VLAN ID. For example, on a system with one network card (
eth0) that needs to talk to two different VLANs with VLAN IDs 10 and 11, you'll need these files:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.10
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.11
These files will configure your system to have two virtual Ethernet interfaces called eth0.10 and eth0.11 that use tagged frames for communication to VLANs 10 and 11. To create the configuration files for the virtual tagged interfaces, copy the contents of your original
ifcfg-eth0 file to
ifcfg-eth0.10 and
ifcfg-eth0.11. Then comment out or remove everything in your
ifcfg-eth0 file except for
Next, edit the
DEVICE= line in the
ifcfg-eth0.10 and
ifcfg-eth0.11 files so that they read
eth0.10 and
eth0.11 respectively. Add the line
VLAN=yes to both files. Finish configuring these virtual adapters with the correct IP address and subnet mask for each VLAN, or with a
BOOTPROTO=dhcp line if addresses are given out via DHCP. Don't forget to include a default gateway in
/etc/sysconfig/network. It's important to remember that you can only have one default gateway.
Issue the command:
# service network restart
to complete the process. The
VLAN=yes entries cause the network startup scripts to automatically run the
vconfig command to add the necessary VLAN entries in
/proc/net/vlan for each VLAN tag.
Here are the completed files for a network set up to only transmit tagged frames and with both virtual adapters set to use DHCP:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.10
DEVICE=eth0.10
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
VLAN=yes
|
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.11
DEVICE=eth0.11
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
VLAN=yes
|
If you accidentally created a virtual adapter with the wrong VLAN ID, you may need to use the
vconfig command to remove it from the
/proc filesystem. Just restarting the network service won't do that for you. For example, if you accidentally created a virtual adapter called
eth0.12, the following command will remove it from /proc/net/vlan:
# vconfig rem eth0.12
