Hi, Can anybody tell me what benefit for building a tap pseudo ethernet device driver for some sort of network communication? Why not directly communicate thru a "real" ethernet device driver like fxp0, xl0, etc. Thanks Sam ____________________________________________________ Sell on Yahoo! Auctions ? no fees. Bid on great items. http://auctions.yahoo.com/
On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:48:55PM -0700, snort Snort wrote:> Can anybody tell me what benefit for building a tap > pseudo ethernet device driver for some sort of network > communication? Why not directly communicate thru a > "real" ethernet device driver like fxp0, xl0, etc.A tap interface can be used by machine that don't have real hardware (for example, a vmware virtual machine) to access a real network. Another possibility is to use a tap interface to bridge two ethernets together over an intermediate IP network, possibly encrypting the frames in transit. David.
On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:48:55PM -0700, snort Snort wrote:> Can anybody tell me what benefit for building a tap > pseudo ethernet device driver for some sort of network > communication? Why not directly communicate thru a > "real" ethernet device driver like fxp0, xl0, etc.Sometimes you want to emulate Ethernet over another link layer. Or you might want to just simulate an Ethernet network. Or the Ethernet hardware might not actually physically exist. Look at OpenVPN and VMware for concrete examples of the use of tun/tap. BMS