VLAN

Virtual Local Area Network elements are used to replace physical networking components to facilitate testing network configurations where a physical connection to a network is not available or inconvenient.

VLANs can be configured to create a network with any arbitrary MAC address size, so they can be used to simulate smaller networks such as ARCNET that has one octet address, or larger networks such as Ethernet or IP. These simulations are restricted to supporting unicast and broadcast messages, more sophisticated simlulations of multicast address or IP routers performing NAT may be added in the future.

VLAN

The VLAN component creates a virtual network with a collection of connection nodes, or stations. Each node has a unique address:

<VLAN>
    <Node address="node_address" server="server_label" promiscuous="flag" />
    ...additional nodes...
</VLAN>

Each child Node component is a connection to the network. All traffic being sent on the network will have the node_address as a source address.

The promiscuous flag is “y” or “Y” if the node listens for all traffic on the VLAN, and may also “spoof” other devices by including both a source and destination address.

Samples

For these and other samples, the components are described in configuration starting from the bottom of a stack and proceeding up. In the coorisponding diagrams, upstream traffic goes from left to right, the downstream traffic from right to left.

VLAN Echo

This sample configuration file creates a virtual network with three nodes:

<BFR>
    Create a network with three nodes:

    <VLAN>
        <Node address="1" server="a" promiscuous="y" />
        <Node address="2" server="b" />
        <Node address="3" server="c" />
    </VLAN>

    On the first node, bind a debugger:

    <Debug client="a" prefix="a" />

    On the second node, bind a console:

    <Console client="b" />

    On the third node, bind an echo:

    <Echo client="c" />
</BFR>

VLAN Echo

In this sequence, the user enters a broadcast message on the console, such as this:

* 01020304

The message travels downstream from the console to node B (1). The node recognizes recognises that it should be distributed to all of the other nodes in the VLAN, so it provides a copy of the message to A (2) and an additional copy to C (3). These two messages, number (2) and (3) are between two peers, so they are not strictly upstream or downstream messages.

The node A sends the packet upstream to the Debug component (4) which prints the message to stdout.

The node C sends its copy of the packet upstream to the Echo component (5). The Echo component swaps the source and desination address and send it back down to C (6). Then C recognises the destination address for B and sends the packet to it (7).

The node B receives the packet and sends it upstream to the console, which prints the packet.

Note

The node A at address 1 is set as promiscuous so it will receive a copy of every packet on the network, including those sent from C to B. So in addition to the debugging messages that are in the stream of packets on other nodes, node A will print out the contents of every message on the LAN.