util-vserver:SplitSharedNetworks

Split shared networks with util-vserver: What are we trying to manage here: vservers are pretty good and pretty secure wrt networking. But there comes a time when your iron is to big and can server vservers on security wise multiple networks. Multi-homes is always a pain especially if you have an external firewall. You will make vlans on your big iron, but how will you firewall between one vlan and another on that same iron? Will you duplicate functionality, and have extra firewalling on your big iron, while you have another big iron doing that dedicated already? That's where network namespaces come into the picture. Network namespaces give the ability to have a seperate ip-stack per namespace. That's right: that's including iptables, multiple routing tables and whatever. If we can have multiple ip-stacks, we can give each vserver a seperate ip-stack, right? Well, yeah, but why? An ip-stack usually means another l2 or l3 interfacing, especially if those vservers are supposed to be on the same network. So we group all vservers in that belong security wise into same network also into the same network namespace. This gives the benefit that we don't have to fool around with special virtual bridges, virtual ethernet devices or whatever.

So this page will describe how to setup multiples of (a group of vservers which share the same ipstack on a single vlan) on a single system with only using vlans as network virtualization.