I am playing with a new Fortigate firewall at my company. I talked about it in the most recent episode of Tech Chop. Well it came in the mail today and I started to configure it. Unlike my current firewall, I can't assign particular VLANs to the individual physical ports. If I want to have multiple subnets on my network, which I do, I have to create virtual VLAN interfaces under the five physical "internal" ports.
This isn't a problem once I get it into place because my core switches handle VLAN tagging, and trunk ports. The problem is configuring it without a switch because by default your computer's NIC doesn't handle VLAN tagging.
Notice that you can tag your VLAN any way you want. If your VLAN is tagged VLAN 104 on your switch, your interface will be vlan104 in Ubuntu. Makes sense right?
The only problem I had with this is that if I wanted to change the VLAN tagging to test connectivity on the other VLANs I was setting up I had to reboot for the changes to take affect. Simply restarting the network service didn't do the trick. If you know of a better way than rebooting, let me know in the comments.
Anyway, since I was able to tag my NIC with various VLANs, I was able to test connectivity on all the virtual interfaces on my new Fortinet without having to set up another switch!