[Noisebridge-discuss] Linux Ethernet-over-IP tunnels

[Jonathan Lassoff]

Excerpts from Rodney Thayer's message of Sat Sep 12 09:58:09 -0700 2009:
> ok someone else already used "sexy" and "ethernet frame" in the same 
> post so I can do it too ;-)
> 
> I believe another sexy way to do this is to run MPLS and let the kernel 
> pump the frames over IP just like an MPLS cloud would.  I've not done 
> this.  I just checked and there was (as of Fedora 8...) some MPLS Linux 
> kernel work.

Using MPLS as a network-layer-ish forwarding mechanism makes sense for
what I'm doing. In fact, it's what I'm trying to replace. :)

There's some limited vendor support for using multiprotocol BGP to
compute a topological mesh of MPLS-labeled tunnels between provider-edge
routers. Perfect for scaling out "virtual" LANs. But this requires
expensive hardware and software, so I'm trying to see if I can make
something similar with free software.

>From what I can find (mind you I've yet to give this an actual test),
Linux supports forwarding/routing MPLS labeled frames, but doesn't yet
support Martini-draft style encapsulation of arbitrary data link layer
formats.

Looks like some code needs to be written :)

--j