VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network which includes tools such as 'vde_switch' and 'vdeqemu'. VDE switch has several virtual ports where virtual machines, applications, virtual interfaces and connectivity tools can be virtually plugged in. VDE qemu works as a wrapper for running qemu virtual machines that connects transparently to a specified vde_switch VDE is dependant upon TUN/TAP support in the Linux Kernel; this comes enabled by default with Slackware 12's 'generic' kernel. To enable TUN/TAP support manually, you must set the following entry in your kernel's '.config' file and recompile: CONFIG_TUN=m ## Configuration An init script has been provided in /etc/rc.d/rc.vde2 to use with vde_switch. Edit this script and provide the TAP inteface name as well as the subnet for your Virtual Switch to use. Do NOT choose a subnet which is already in use. More than likely, the default values will work fine. ## VDE + Qemu A common usage for vde_switch is to be able to have emulated OS's via Qemu behave as if they were actually attached to a Local Network. To enable this functionality with Qemu, replace any calls to 'qemu' with the following command: vdeqemu -net vde,vlan=0 -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF Note that the 'macaddr' string is optional but can prove to be quite useful when used in conjuction with a DHCP server (such as dhcpd or dnsmasq) to assign IP's based upon MAC address. Do not forget to include the options which point vdeqemu to your ISO image to boot along with any other options you may have used with 'qemu' such as -localtime, -nographic etc. ## Startup To have this start upon each boot, add the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local and make sure rc.vde2 is executable. # Start vde_switch if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.vde2 ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.vde2 start fi