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WTF is up with switches?
(lazysoci.al)
A community to help people learn, install, set up or troubleshoot their home network equipment and solutions.
You’ve run up against the first thing that seems to really confuse people when they begin learning about networking.
What you thought of as a LAN is a LAN. A VLAN is a Virtual LAN. It’s the same concept but virtualized, allowing more than one LAN on hardware that is just physically a single LAN.
When most people are talking about setting up VLANs they are usually describing the creation of a separate layer 3 subnet and the creation of a VLAN ID that gets tagged to all packets that get sent on that separate subnet. This allows for both layer 2 and 3 separation of the virtual lans on a single physical network.
Conceptually it’s very similar to VM’s running on a single server.
So what differentiates a virtual LAN from a real LAN? Like how can I tell which one my ISP had set-up?