Ok, so this is driving me up the wall, I have a great deal of trouble figuring out the difference between layer 2 and layer 3 in a large network. So hoping that someone can help explain this to me better.
I understand a layer 2 network to largely be based on MAC address, so a layer 2 switched environment would normally be a bunch of physical ports, the devices have IP addresses, they ARP and RARP back and forth to resolve station IDs and can send to each other using IPs or MACs which is fine and all that. You can have multiple vlans on the layer 2 switch, different physical ports tagged to vlans (in access mode on cisco?) i believe are all still layer 2.
Layer 3 comes into effect if you give the vlan itself an IP address or an interface on the hosting switch of the vlan to allow it to cross other networks.
Is that basically it? A Layer 2 can have IPs but becomes layer 3 if the vlan itself or the switching interfaces are given ips?
What's the difference between a layer 2 and a layer 3 trunk then? Since vlans can be l2 or l3, is it just adding an IP to the vlan on a switch makes it layer 3?
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