As mentioned in a previous post, Saskaweb is looking for additional space.  We’re in talks with our current landlord for another server room but there might be a snag.

They’re not too keen on running lines between our existing space and the new space.  The workaround they offer is a VLAN on their switches between the two spaces.  The fee for this VLAN and the additional connections is reasonable and each link would be 100Mb.  But……

Saskaweb uses VLANs for our Saskatoon colocation service, managed hosting, and VPS hosting.  We can’t put our trunk on their VLAN.  Or can we….

From a brief read, L2TPv3 might be exactly what we need.  Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol should allow me to send a trunk over their 100Mb VLAN’ed line.  Of course there are some catches:

1. Specs weren’t easy to find, but I’ll bet there’s a performance hit:  I can’t believe we’d get wire speed and the risks of fragmentation could stress the router CPUs
2. No VTP.  Not a deal-breaker as we keep up-to-date documentation on all our VLANs, but still a bit of a pain.
3. I’ve never set up L2TPv3 before

I guess number 3 shouldn’t be considered a catch — the only days where a sysadmin doesn’t learn something new are holidays.

Posted in Sysadmin Tales