Network Terminology Key Terms & Lexicon

At Full Span Networks the goal is to serve customers no matter their routing platform preference.  The trouble with this can be that some terminology from platform to platform can differ a bit.  This document attempts to standardize terms and over communicate how we use them in configurations to make configuration and interoperability as simple as possible. 

L2TP

Client :  The device initiating the L2TP connection.  Almost always a customer device.

Network Access Server (NAS):  This is the node or nodes in the Full Span Networks network that terminate L2TP connections.

Address Pool:  Full Span Networks may allocate IP addresses to your system statically or from a pool of addresses as part of the L2TP connection establishment process.

GRE

Tunnel Source Address:  From the perspective of the device, you are configuring this is the address assigned to a physical interface that will be encapsulating traffic.  This is the underlay address.

Tunnel Destination Address:  From the perspective of the device, you are configuring this is the address assigned to a physical interface of the remote device you will be sending GRE encapsulated traffic to.  This is an underlay address.

Local Tunnel Address:  This address is assigned to the GRE Tunnel interface on the device you are configuring.  It will appear as a local address in your list of device IP interfaces.  This is an overlay address.

Remote Tunnel Address:  This is the other end of the tunnel connection that pairs with your Local Tunnel Address.  This address will need to be in a common subnet with the Local Tunnel Address.  This is an overlay address.

Note:  When peering with Full Span Networks to advertise BGP routes you will typically establish the session between your Local Tunnel Address and our Remote Tunnel Address.