I've got small network with a typical wifi router serving as both a gateway to the Internet and an access point for wireless clients. I've also got a small gigabit Ethernet network with 3 hosts that I would like to participate transparently with the wifi network. One of these hosts is running Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty) and has a wifi card in it as well, so the plan is to bridge that wifi interface to the Ethernet interface and achieve full connectivity with that.

I've been reading the BRIDGE-STP-HOWTO and the instructions do not work. Right after I add the wifi interface (wlan0) to the bridge, I lose connectivity to the wireless network; ifconfig shows that wlan0 still has an IP but I cannot ping the wifi gateway. Same results when I bring the new bridge interface up.

Obviously I'm doing something wrong, and it doesn't help that the HOWTO doesn't cover wifi links. I have a feeling it has something to do with the order/mechanism by which the physical interfaces are initiated. Currently, my wifi connection is setup by NetworkManager when I log in; hence, wlan0 is already running when I add it to the bridge. (The fact that the HOWTO says to "Zero IP the interfaces" after creating the bridge leads me to believe that the interfaces must come up after the bridge has been created--but NetworkManager doesn't appear to know how to work with briges.).

Can someone point me in the right direction here? I'd *like* to keep using NetworkManager if possible because it seems to handle connecting with WPA2 with ease.

Thanks.

Am I correct in thinking you have

1. 3 boxes as a gigabit network, wired to a typical router (Does that do gigabit? It's hardly typical then)
2. A wifi card in one of the boxes which you want to use to give yourself a 1001Mb connection to your router (which I presume has a slow (by comparison) feed out? How is this going to speed anything up? You are asking a lot of the bridging code. If the wifi box is a laptop, beware of 'ethernet switching' being set in the bios, which switches off one when the other is active.

That apart, I really think you need to hack into your router. As for pointing you in the right direction, allow me to quote the Irishman when asked for directions to somewhere: "If I was you, I wouldn't start from here at all!" :-)

business_kid: Not quite. Let me do a better job of explaining my network ASCIIly...

Incidentally, the "wifi router/AP" is typical router hardware (Linksys WRT54GL) but I am running atypical router firmware on it (Tomato). I'm not really doing anything complex with it, but it does run a DHCP server that statically assigns addresses.

What I'm essentially going for here is to have all of my computers/printer appear to be on the same 192.168.1.x network. Obviously, that's easy for the laptop and Linux PC: They just connect to the wifi router and get assigned an address. But what if I want to print from the laptop? Or if I want to access the Internet from the Windows PC? In both of these cases, the Linux PC needs to act as a bridge to those packets.

I have had this "kinda working" by using NAT before, but NAT imposes the following limitations:

1. The Windows PC and printer can't get their IP from the DHCP server (which is only reachable via wireless)

2. The Windows PC and laptop can't share files easily with SMB because they are on separate networks.

I know I can refine the NAT setup more by proper routing and using a DHCP relay agent and installing a WINS server, etc. ... But bridging just looks easier on paper.

You'll have tpo give up on NetworkManager if you want to get clever, and use the init scripts instead. Otherwise you will end up in a home for the bewildered. With that setup, you can probably assign static IPs to everything, and then enter the appropriate lines in /etc/hosts. What mode are you setting each wifi interface to?