From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Feb 10 22:12:36 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7E98E16A4CE for ; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:12:36 +0000 (GMT) Received: from csa.cs.okstate.edu (a.cs.okstate.edu [139.78.113.1]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 44DD843D48 for ; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:12:36 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from lreid@a.cs.okstate.edu) Received: by csa.cs.okstate.edu (Postfix, from userid 601) id C45ACA068E; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:12:35 -0600 (CST) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from 164.58.79.196 (auth. user lreid@a.cs.okstate.edu) by cs.okstate.edu with HTTP; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:12:35 -0600 X-IlohaMail-Blah: lreid@a.cs.okstate.edu X-IlohaMail-Method: mail() [mem] X-IlohaMail-Dummy: moo X-Mailer: IlohaMail/0.8.12 (On: cs.okstate.edu) From: "Reid Linnemann" Bounce-To: "Reid Linnemann" Errors-To: "Reid Linnemann" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: <20050210221235.C45ACA068E@csa.cs.okstate.edu> Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:12:35 -0600 (CST) Subject: wireless-to-wired bridging X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:12:36 -0000 I have a question that is more of a networking question than a BSD question, but I am hoping someone out there has faced this same dilemma before and has some advice: I have a FreeBSD machine running -current that servers as a router for my home LAN, using nat. I recently tossed in a DLink DWL-G520 wireless card (ath0), and bridged that interface to the internal LAN interface on the machine (rl1). After a bit of configurating, I had the ath interface in hostap mode, and everything was working great - except the wired clients cannot route to eachother. I am suspicious that, since the wired network is in AP mode, if a wireless client wants to send a packet to another wireless client, it must be sent to the AP, which should theoretically redirect the packet to the appropriate host on the wireless net. In the wired network, a switch handles this automagically on the datalink layer without those messages hitting the rl1 interface of the BSD router. I've looked at the bridge code, and it seems that unless a packet is multicast or broadcast it will be copied to the other bridge interfaces but not returned to the original caller. Since the packets being sent between wireless clients are not broadcast, I think they are getting dumped into the black hole of the wired LAN, and not being processed and pumped back out through the ath interface. Is this a correct assumption? Are there ways I can overcome this problem? Thanks, Reid