LISNews: Librarian Blog Since 1999

We all got to start some where. Whether you are a giggling lunatic looking to stop laughing at the slightest little thing, or the village idiot looking for some brains, it all begins with the decision to start.

I was looking forward (in time, mostly) to connecting up to the Alberta Supernet when it finally gets dropped at our door. What is Supernet as it referenced here in Alberta? From this pdf then:

In its simplest terms, SuperNet is a high-capacity fibre-optic and wireless network linking government offices, schools, health-care facilities and libraries in more than 400 Alberta communities.

A drop is the pipe that connects our location to the rest of SuperNet. Now, those devices that sit at our location, the piece of hardware that begins the journey of moving our library's content over the fibre is called a SuperNet Edge Device, or SED. This is usually some highly priced Cisco device. The idea being having organizations connecting to SuperNet to buy some other basic 802.1Q device, called a Customer Edge Device (CED), also from Cisco.

Now, anyone that has read my journals by now knows that I would have no intention of lowering myself to such a level (of purchasing a Cisco device, that is - but being forced into it is another matter entirely). Why should I? I know of an awesome OS that can do the job and more. Plus I have plenty of retiring hardware in the "to be re-assigned" queue. All that was left was the know-how.

So I knew I needed basic connectivity using something called "vlans". But how the heck does it all work together? To find out, I set up two PIII's side-by-side, each with 2 NICs, and assigned some bogus IP addresses, and installed the latest version of my favourite OS on them. The real key was to know how to use "vlan" device. After some digging, I finally came upon this example. Well, problem post on a very good forum board, actually. But for my simple test, serves as my example very nicely.

1. Machine 1:
   • ifconfig vlan0 create
   • ifconfig vlan0 172.16.0.10 255.255.255.0 vlan 0 vlandev fxp0
2. Machine 2:
   • ifconfig vlan0 create
   • ifconfig vlan0 172.16.0.20 255.255.255.0 vlan 0 vlandev fxp0
3. Then ping "172.16.0.10" or "172.16.0.20", depending on which machine you are on. You should see something like this:
   

   # ping 172.16.0.10
   PING 172.16.0.10 (172.16.0.10): 56 data bytes
   64 bytes from 172.16.0.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.390 ms
   64 bytes from 172.16.0.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.158 ms

Yes. It really is that simple. Scary, eh? The cost of the OS and the re-use of some old hardware, you could save your library $500+ too.