i'm running 2.4.20 & i'd like to bridge my wlan & ethernet interfaces - does anyone know a way to do this?

thanks in advance.

Although I never have bridged a wlan and an enet card, I have done bridging using Linux. It is relatively easy.

Make sure you have bridging enabled in the kernel or the appropriate module.
Download or install the bridge configuration utilities. you may have them already, you may not.

The command you'll need is brctl.

Start off by adding a bridge interface

brctl addbr br0

Next add the interfaces to the bridge

brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 wlan0

Then give your interface an ipaddress, ifconfig i believe works here. You dont have to assign an ip address but you might as well.

ifconfig br0 <ipaddress>

Bring the bridge up, if it isnt already
ifconfig br0 up

The only tricky part is making you WLAN card work. Also, if your interested, you can also use ebtables to put in a transparent firewall :-)

Hope this helps

thank you, i did load that uitility & the bridge did appear to form, ifconfig shows the bridge; but the bridge does not pass any data thru from the wireless side to the wired side, nor vice versa. do you know of any issues? I'm using a Harris card with prism2 chipset. the Harris card is quite restrictive about access to the mac & phy layers, as well as higher level configuration parameters.

thanks again.

I am not aware of any specific issues. That being said, I only played around with the linux wireless enough to set up my wireless. I have a reg NIC also, just wanted to get it working. At least you have a wireless card that appears to be supported. Mine only works if i use the ndiswrapper package and the windows drivers...

Are both sides able to reach the bridge? Assign an ip to the bridge device. If you can't ping that address from each side, something is wrong with your network configuration. If you can ping it from one side and not the other, take a look at that adapter and make sure it's working properly.

Check each interface, the eth0, wlan0 and br0 (or whatever your bridge device is) and make sure they are all up. If not all are up, bring up the down one.

If everything appears right, you can ping the bridge machine from both sides of the bridge and the bridge interface is up and configured properly and things still don't work.... well then you got me. Perhaps there is some issue with wlan cards and bridging or perhaps just that one

I'll see if i can make this work on my machine, however different hardware produces different results.

Hope this helps

thanks for the reply.

all three (br0, eth0, wlan0) are up & when i assign an ip address to the bring i can only ping it from one side. i do believe this is a card issue. i've also been seeing some literatrure on setting the wlan as an AP, but i'm not sure i want to go that route - i'm pretty sure my bridge is configured correctly & the card has an interfacing/configuration issue i've not yet found. the card is freezing my system too, which i've experienced with this card when trying to query mib parameters while my network is active. the card is a demo card that has encryption modifications & i've contacted the manufacturer's engineers about several issues.

i will be interested to know how your experiment turns out.

thanks again.

sorry for the delay in getting back... anyway, I was able to bridge using wireless as expected.

my setup is debian testing branch
kernel 2.6.12
ndiswrapper 1.7 using linksys pci wireless card
intel wired lan card

it all worked perfectly. so given that fact, id have to say it was your particular card. especially given the fact is doesnt work at all.

anyway sorry i wasnt able to help you further.

good luck

FYI: i have a working bridge in my laptop, i cannot make it work in the desktop with the pci-pcmcia interface card. the bridge sets up ok, but after one ping the bridge locks. as an experiment i tried using the same card in windows xp - it wouldn't bridge at all. anyway, the wireless card does work, but only in my laptop. i'm looking into another pci-pcmcia hardware bridge to replace my existing card.

thanks again for the help.