Hi all, I am having some serious dramas trying to configure a Network Bridge between the network cards facing the Web and My Lan on my Suse 9.0 box.

I have had some very bizarre results, the current situation is as follows:

I can ping from a Client to the LAN side card in the server and vice versa.
I can see and ping the web from the web side card in the Server.
I get a response from the 3 Lan machines (all suse 9.0) and the server if i do a broadcast ping.
I cannot get any web connectivity from the LAN to the web.

Also, If i ping from a client to the server or vice versa on more than 3 occaisions, the responding machine locks up beyond recovery and requires rebooting. I am certain that this is not network card related as i have tried numerous network cards and the results are the same

The two Network cards in the server are configured and recognised and show up as "normal" using the ifconfig command.

Web side card is configured as DHCP, the issued IP to it is allways in a different subnet to the LAN cards which I believe is preferred (please correct me if i am wrong) Lan side cards are static IP in the 192.168.0.1-255 range.

It seems that the server knows the two cards exist but cant make the cards actually speak to each other. Using Brctl enables me to build and configure a bridge, all seems ok but the bridge still does not work.

I have been through all the SUSE doc and Howtos i can find as well as various other Howtos but still no joy. I had a similar problem with Suse 8 but it resloved itself before I could actually find out what the problem was.

Does anyone have any ideas???

Check your DNS configuration. Ussualy being able to connect to any of your machines in a LAN and not being able to connect to the Web is due to false DNS configuration.

When you make a bridge, the network cards (eth0 and eth1, or whatever) shouldn't be assigned ip addresses - you assign the ip address to the virtual bridge interface you created with brctl addbr. I think you really want to be doing routing, not bridging, as bridging is pretty much the same as a switch.

>the network cards facing the Web
The web is not the internet.

>If i ping from a client to the server or vice versa on more than
>3 occaisions, the responding machine locks up beyond recovery
That should not happen. Software bug, IRQ conflict, hardware, who knows.


>Web side card is configured as DHCP, the issued IP to it is allways in a
>different subnet to the LAN cards which I believe is preferred
>(please correct me if i am wrong)
If your ISP gave you more than one internet ip address you could have
the machines in the same subnet.

>Lan side cards are static IP in the 192.168.0.1-255 range.
In that case, as marghorp pointed out, briding is the wrong thing to do,
When you bridge you send packets out to the internet with a source address of 192.168.0.x, you will never get a reply.
That range of addresses only works on LAN's

When you use reserved-for-LAN addreses you have to have a
NAT/connection sharing system/ipmasq box/whatever you call it
or use a proxy.

Get rid of the bridge and set iptables to NAT the traffic.

I thought that using a bridge allowed me to use IP Masquerading and send all packets to the internet with a single IP. If this is not the case with using a bridge then i will give the routing a try and see what happens. Thx for the advice people.