File sharing on an OpenBSD bridging firewall
 

Being quite new at the concept of bridging, i've read a few papers wich explained that a bridging firewall would be something like a black box, completly invisible, transparent an therefore unreachable.
So here i'm thinking about using it on my home lan and suddenly i remember i wanted this machine(which will have OpenBSD) to act also as file/backup and database(mysql) server.

From what i read it is quite impossible to do that and turnning the computer into a bridging firewall, but i wanted to check this to people who know more about networking than me. And i would also like to know if without bridging, an OpenBSD firewall should still provide very strong protection.

Thanks.

Hi,

No, that's not impossible. You'll loose the transparence, but your firewall can act as a bridge & run some daemons.

The feature is called ebtables, I've never used it, but it exists.

Ok, i've checked ebtables and from what i've read the caractheristic i need is called "Brouting: decide which traffic to bridge between two interfaces and which traffic to route between the same two interfaces. The two interfaces belong to a logical bridge device but have their own IP address and can belong to a different subnet.".

Ok so far. But...Is it not possible to do it directly with PF(Openbsd)?

Re,

don't know much about freebee... I wanted to give it a try but the hard disk controller I intended to use was not recognized during installation... so I could not write anyhting to the disk.

Anyway, if you really want to set up a transparent filtering bridge, it's not a good idea to use it as a server as well : you'll completly loose the feature of a "black box".