tun vs tap?

jeff.sadowski

I created a simple tap setup so as not to have to setup any routing rules or create a new ip scope.
It seems that tun is the preferred method from the documentation but being how easy it is to setup a tap I was wondering why? I have a decently fast server and network and maybe at most 3 people that might use the vpn at any one time.

mwandelaar

It's pretty easy to decide which you need:

TAP is ethernet-bridging and thus sending entire ethernet-frames over the VPN. Drawback is quite a lot overhead due to bigger packets and transfering all broadcast-packets. Snippet from the forum-rules:

**You ONLY want to use dev tap if you are tunneling layer2 traffic, if you are using IP traffic you want tun. If you are using tap only for windows file sharing, look into running a WINS server instead.

That doesn't tell you ethernet-tunneling is hard to setup, but neither is routing and that really cut's down the overhead transfered through your tunnel.