network resquest to tap pseudo device driver

[David Malone]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:48:55PM -0700, snort Snort wrote:
> Can anybody tell me what benefit for building a tap
> pseudo ethernet device driver for some sort of network
> communication? Why not directly communicate thru a
> "real" ethernet device driver like fxp0, xl0, etc.

A tap interface can be used by machine that don't have real hardware
(for example, a vmware virtual machine) to access a real network.
Another possibility is to use a tap interface to bridge two ethernets
together over an intermediate IP network, possibly encrypting the
frames in transit.

	David.