Date: 11 Feb 2005 09:28:01 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: "Reid Linnemann" <lreid@cs.okstate.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: wireless-to-wired bridging Message-ID: <443bw3p3wu.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <20050210221235.C45ACA068E@csa.cs.okstate.edu> References: <20050210221235.C45ACA068E@csa.cs.okstate.edu>
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"Reid Linnemann" <lreid@cs.okstate.edu> writes: > 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? I think that you mixed up the terms "wired" and "wireless" in some (but not all) of the uses above. This makes it somewhat harder to follow the problem. I would actually suggest that you make the wireless link a separate subnet from the Ethernets. 802.11 really is a different protocol than 802.1, and I don't think you'll get any performance benefit from bridging in this case.
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