gvrpad

Gvrpad is a daemon designed for FreeBSD systems that makes GVRP announcements of all VLAN interfaces. The purpose of the GARP VLAN Registration Protocol (GVRP) is to allow switches or trunked end stations to announce to the network what VLANs should be forwarded to that device. With this protocol in place, VLANs only need to be configured on the member ports, and the protocol figures out which trunk ports are effectively also members.

This daemon solely announces the VLANs statically configured on each interface to that interface and does not listen for inbound GVRP announcements. It provides various options that can be used for customization. For instance, gvrpad can write debug messages to stdout with the -d option. The -f option allows the gvrpad to run on the foreground without getting daemonized.

To terminate the process, send a SIGINT to the process after setting the PID file with the -i option. The -l option specifies the number of LeaveAll actions that must be sent every few updates. Use -l 1 to send LeaveAll with every update. The default is to send LeaveAll every 3 updates. The -t option sets the time in seconds to wait between updates. The default value is 3.

The -x option can be used to exclude the listed interfaces. The handling of interface parameters is as follows: if no parameters are given, all interfaces that have VLANs configured on them will receive GVRP announcements. If interfaces are listed and the -x switch is not specified, only interfaces that have configured VLANs AND are included in the parameter list will receive GVRP updates. If interfaces are listed, the -x switch is specified, all interfaces with VLANs configured but are NOT included in the parameter list will receive GVRP announcements.

The interface parameters are string matched on interfaces found on the system, and a misspelled name will not generate an error. Overall, gvrpad is an effective and efficient daemon for making GVRP announcements of all VLAN interfaces.