Until recently, I’ve never had a chance to use VLANs on FreeBSD hosts, though I sometimes configure them on ethernet switches. But when I was playing with vnet jails, I suddenly got interested in VLAN configuration on FreeBSD and experimented with it for some time. I wrote this short article to summarize my current understanding of how to configure VLANs on FreeBSD. Terminology I think the word VLAN is being used in at least two different senses.

FreeBSD jails are often talked about from a security or system administration perspective. Although it’s a perfectly valid point of view, jails can also be used for other purposes. In fact, just recently I benefited from a jail in such a situation. It once again convinced me that jails were really awesome and made me write up this short article. Assumptions The host is a graphical desktop workstation running FreeBSD 12.

I have heard about jails many times since my early days of FreeBSD life but it was only the last year I began to use it in production. This article is a sort of personal notebook where I summarize what I learned about jails. It would be frequently updated as I learn more. Assumptions The host is running FreeBSD 11.2/amd64 on ZFS. Each jail has a separate root dataset under /vm on the host.