From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 17 05:41:10 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id FAA03170 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 17 Nov 1995 05:41:10 -0800 Received: from MediaCity.com (root@easy1.mediacity.com [205.216.172.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id FAA03159 for ; Fri, 17 Nov 1995 05:41:08 -0800 Received: (from brian@localhost) by MediaCity.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id FAA04547; Fri, 17 Nov 1995 05:44:30 -0800 From: Brian Litzinger Message-Id: <199511171344.FAA04547@MediaCity.com> Subject: Re: Unix program to make a pc into an ethernet bridge To: PLAZAS_CHRISTIAN@mercury.csg.peachnet.edu (Christian) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 05:44:30 -0800 (PST) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Christian" at Nov 17, 95 08:29:13 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8b] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1617 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > The program I found does real ethernet level bridging and I have it > running on a spare Dx66 w/16Mb of ram...and it works very well so > far...but it takes control of the whole machine and kinda feel that > is a major waste of a good machine, it would be cool to run other > things at the same time. The only protocols I use on our > network are ip and ipx so perhaps that is one possible solution..my > only concern is the throughput of such an arrangement. The PCbridge > program I am using doesn't seem to give me a performance penalty..but > that could be because its running on a 486 dx66. Finally I need > advice as to how to get freeBSD to do the ip and ipx bridging as I am > not very knowledgeable in that area. I'm only familiar with IP, but I've heard that IPX can be done also. You might ask questions@freebsd.org about IPX. Basically, you install FreeBSD on machine with two ethernet interfaces. Let us say you want to bridge networks 10.0.1.0 and 10.0.2.0 and your network interfaces are named ed0 and ed1 ifconfig ed0 inet 10.0.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.0.1.255 ifconfig ed1 inet 10.0.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.0.2.255 sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 And you are done. I don't think you will notice and performance loss. 10 mbits/sec is pretty slow. It may be necessary to change the routing on your hosts depending on how the bridge was working. For example host 10.0.1.2 might need a route added like route add default 10.0.1.1 or route add 10.0.2.0 10.0.1.1 depending on how things are organized. Brian Litzinger brian@mediacity.com