What is Virtue LAN?

Monday

thursday

In the previous post, we have talked about LAN (local area network), which is
computer network covering a small physical area. The LAN we talked about is made of physical devices such as computer, hub, switch, router, repeater which hurt if dropping on your feet. So.... what the heck is a "virtual LAN"? The name seems to suggest some kind of imaginary network... Ok, forget about the god-knows-who Virtue LAN for now, let's talk about a roommates crisis recently.

Charlse, Tony, Kelley and Alice are roommates. Their computers are connected together by a switch, thus form a home LAN. By default, if one computer in the LAN send a message, the switch will broadcast the message to all the other three computers.
At Wenesday night, Tony did a stupid thing, Kelley and Alice became so angry at him that they even refuse to share the LAN with this guy. As Tony's best friend, Charlse decided to stood with him. So the roommates reconfigured the switch. Now, There are two groups: group 1 -- Charlse and Tony; group 2 -- Alice and Kelley. The message from either Tony's or Charlse's computer will not be passed to Alice's and Kelley's. The same thing happened at the girls side, the girls' messages now only broadcast between girls. As a result, we get two VLAN, physically, they share the same LAN, but logically, when a member of one VLAN sends a broadcast, only the other members of the same VLAN will receive the broadcast.

By the way, at Friday, all the roommates agreed that it's a sick example of VLAN, so they set the switches back to the default value thus wiped out the poor VLANs from the face of the earth.

[ Supporting files]
[ Socialize This]