Dear forum members,
I have been googling around for almost 7 days now trying various samples and suggestions and still cannot figure out how to solve the following issue:
I have a linux box (Fedora core 5, 2.6.15) with two NICs installed: One 10/100 Ethernet and one Wireless 802.11b (Cisco Aironet 350 PCI). My purpose is to bridge those two interfaces (eth0 - wireless, eth1 - wired), so that the computers on both sides exchanged traffic as if they were on the same physical network, on the same subnet.
First I tried to bridge those two connections with "brctl" utility to act as a layer 2 bridge: created a new bridge (brctl addbr br0), then added those two interfaces to the bridge (brctl addif br0 addif eth0, eth1). For ease of administration, I also added an IP address to the bridge interface br0 itself (192.168.0.10), meanwhile removing all IP information from eth0 and eth1 interfaces (as per to most tutorials available on google).
Having all this configured, I am now able to ping to both sides of the network: wireless over eth0 and wired, over eth1. Meanwhile both sides can reach the Linux box as well. But the problem is that the hosts themselves cannot reach each other.
After spending another day in google, I figured out that some wireless cards might not work in layer 2 bridging mode. I supposed that mine was the case.
Next I figured out the key to solution could be using "Proxy ARP" technology. I tried to use the "parprouted" deamon. It worked, but partially! Now ICMP packets (pinging) were successfully passing between clients in both interfaces, but nothing more. I could not even open a port on remote host with telnet. The deamon's manual implies that it is possible to pass unicast traffic between hosts, but at least it did not work in my case.

Now my request is to all people who can assist me in setting up this network scenario. Is it possible to do it through Proxy ARP? What routes should be added? What should be altered in iptables' chains? Any hint is highly appreciated.


Client 1...............((((((((.. )))))))............ Linux Box with bridge ___________________ Client 2
192.168.0.3..............Wireless..................eth0, eth1, br0...............Ethernet..............192.168.0.4
.............................................................192.168.0.10

Thank You.
Best Regards,
Hohenzolern

Just an update:

I tried to enable "Proxy ARP", on my linux box.
echo > 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/proxy_arp
echo > 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth1/proxy_arp

Now I can ping to the internet, from a client (192.168.0.3).
Now the problem is that nothing else is working except PING. No DNS, no http... nothing.

Any ideas?

i'm not sure if this is needed for this setup, or why a ping gets through, but try enabling ip_forwarding

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Thank you Bardinjw for the advice, but I have enabled IP forwarding before.
The problem is solved other way.
First I added a route to eth0 wireless interface.
route add -net 192.168.0.3 netmask 255.255.255.255 dev eth0
I am not sure why, but I also flushed the iptables, and it worked !!
iptables --flush
I guess there was something that blocked non-ICMP packets pass through.
Anyway, thanks everybody for attention.

Regards,
Hohenzolern