VLAN

FIRST

The switch port 24 needs to be plugged into the outside world. How the switch is configured to be a VLAN? No clue. Must be some documentation somewhere.

Here is an article on VLAN under Linux: Linux Journal

On gourd, we have the outside device called "farm". We'd need to call it "eth?" to make this work

From Aaron:
By the way, it looks like you ran into some trouble setting up a VLAN. 
Did I mention that the number after the dot is the VLAN ID and thus
quite significant?  Oh, and it looks like it really has to be ethX, not
a random name.  Hmph.  That's dum - 802.11q is perfectly valid on
802.11g as well, and that often has different device names.  Let's see
if we can fix that....  No apparently not.  I'll take a trip over to Rm
202 in a few minutes to restore gourd to operation.

Configuration Files

From /usr/share/doc/initscripts-8.11.1/sysconfig.txt:

 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface-name> and
 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface-name>:<alias-name>:
   The first defines an interface, and the second contains
   only the parts of the definition that are different in a
   "alias" (or alternative) interface.  For example, the
   network numbers might be different, but everything else
   might be the same, so only the network numbers would be
   in the alias file, but all the device information would
   be in the base ifcfg file.