[nzlug] Guaranteed VLAN

[Robert Coup]

On 14/12/2007, Vik Olliver <vik at catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 11:05 +1300, Steve Holdoway wrote:
> > I know that using OpenVPN will dramatically improve the reliability of
> > the network connection. Is this an option?
>
> Yes, if it doesn't stall when a packet is dropped. If I recall correctly
> it uses UDP, which is fine. But if it doesn't recover from a dropped
> packet quickly enough it won't help. Got any details?

OpenVPN can use either UDP or TCP. It's pretty tolerant of network
connections going up and down. From the docs:

OpenVPN has been rigorously designed and tested to operate robustly
      on unreliable networks.  A major design goal of OpenVPN is that
it          should be as responsive, in terms of both normal
operations and error recovery, as the 	 underlying IP layer that it is
tunneling over.          That means that if the IP layer goes down for
5 minutes, when it comes back up,          tunnel traffic will
immediately resume even if the outage interfered with          a
dynamic key exchange which was scheduled during that time.

Rob :)