Ok, I am still playing around here with routing and 802.1q. My latest endeavor is using Quagga along with shorewall to produce some useful home appliances. Unfortunately, this is all going to be running at a 100MHz clip on Ethernet rather than the nice 1GHz Ethernet lines I have running through the house. However, I get to play with the outcome.
When I last broached the subject here, I had added the 802.1q capability to the RPi Raspbian load. I have since been adding a number of RPis, without a clear purpose to what I would do with them. I now have a quad RPi cluster (shown in the image above) that I can use for some of the networking experiments. The latest experiment is to setup each RPi in the cluster with a Quagga and shorewall routing load. Shorewall is primarily a firewall, but with some alterations to the definition files, it will serve its purpose as a router capability. The Quagga software allows me to experiment with OSPF and BGP routing protocols, the idea being that I can simply configure them and drop them into my network at home at any place and the routing tables will automatically be built for me.
My idea is to use the normal Ethernet interface to the RPi as the connection point to the other Quagga/shorewall RPis on a separate no-mans land VLAN. I would then use 802.1q to trunk my way into VLAN switches which would then distribute the information as necessary. I can also modify the way that I am connecting and actually have a VLAN switch capability on an RPi with attached USB hub running to USB-to-Ethernet adapters, each "port" having a trunk line or untagged port. This of course gets somewhat expensive since the cheapest I can find those adapters is $6.99 at amazon. I wish that I could find an Ethernet switch adapter that would allow me to experiment with an RPi controller.
Update: as you can see from the new site picture, I have been able to setup the RPi cluster along with some cheap ($6.99) USB to Ethernet adapters. Now the fun begins!
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
