[Bridge] Ethernet+Wireless Bridge?

[John W. Linville]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 05:22:49PM +0200, "Peter Valdemar Mørch (Lists)" wrote:
> Hi all you wonderful people,
> 
> Srinivas M.A. srinivas.aji-at-gmail.com |Lists| wrote:
>  > The equivalent solution on Linux seems like parprouted
>  > (http://www.hazard.maks.net/parprouted/), which also seems to be
>  > packaged for Debian, etc. I haven't used it, just found it searching
>  > for "arp proxy" and linux. But it seems worth a look.
> 
> Yes, I tried parprouted. It works well within what it promises to do.
> But broadcast (e.g. for DHCP!) is not supported. It, in turn suggests to
> use dhcrelay to support DHCP with parprouted. But I didn't try that. I
> still hadn't given up on getting a bridge to work.
> 
> But I have now.

Discussion of parprouted is probably off-topic here, but I'm glad
someone mentioned it because I didn't know about it.  I have, however,
been manually using the techniques it seems to use for some time to
good effect.

I have had trouble getting either dhcrelay or dhcp-fwd to work in
this kind of environment.  If you figure-out how to make it work,
let me know!  I suspect that the authors of those utilities did not
anticipate that sort of usage, and therefore are not using APIs that
direct outgoing frames appropriately.  However, I could be wrong --
I haven't dug very deeply.

> John W. Linville linville-at-tuxdriver.com |Lists| wrote:
> > For now, my previous recommendation (routing w/ or w/o IP NAT) still
> > stands as the simplest and best documented approach.  If that does
> > not appeal to you, I suspect that bridging combined with L2 NAT via
> > ebtables as described in the URL cited above will work...YMMV.
> 
> I've just purchased a 3Com 3CRUSB10075 based on the zd1211 driver. Like
> always with Linux it seems, buying hardware is a pseudo-man-month job
> understanding the underlying technologies and so forth. Is the zd1211
> driver "good"? No idea. Does it support WDS?  Promiscuous mode? No idea.
> Will I ever need either? No idea.

Unfortunately, I don't think you will see any different (or at least
not better) behavior with that driver either -- it is also based
on mac80211.

> The fact that I'm frustrated is not an indication that I'm less than in
> awe of the response and attention I've gotten here. Thanks a bundle. I'm
> off to enjoying my 3com with parprouted when it arrives and to
> experiment with nat, routing and ebtables just in case.

Good plan... :-)

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at tuxdriver.com