Re: [SLUG] Laptop Bridge

From: Possum (vegetableblood@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 06 2006 - 18:34:16 EDT


On 9/6/06, Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> wrote:
> Joe Brandt wrote:
> > Anyone know how to set up a laptop to act as a wireless bridge? I would like
> > to use my laptop at SFD as a bridge so our demos (wired network) can access
> > the net trough my wireless adapter.
> >
>
> Install bridge-utils:
>
> # apt-get install bridge-utils
>
> Then use brctl to setup a bridged interface:
>
> # brctl addbr breth0
> # brctl addif breth0 eth0
> # brctl addif breth0 wlan0
>
> Debian users can just add bridge_port to their interfaces file and
> rename the interface:
>
> auto install
> iface breth0 inet dhcp
> bridge_ports eth0
>
> There are issues with bridging wifi. I've had many a hairy issue with
> bridging wireless networks, and getting them to work with different
> vendor hardware. Needless to say, bridging and wireless can be tricky at
> times:
>
> http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/Bridge#It_doesn.27t_work_with_my_Wireless_card.21
>
> "This is a known problem, and it is not caused by the bridge code. Many
> wireless cards don't allow spoofing of the source address. It is a
> firmware restriction with some chipsets. You might find some information
> in the bridge mailing list archives to help. "
>
> Namely, "Doing full bridging of wireless (802.11) requires supporting WDS."
>
> To date, my greatest success has been with WRT54G (Broadcom reference
> design) hardware running DD-WRT in WDS mode with bridging. However, in
> WDS mode (particularly with bridging), the network is _much_ slower than
> a standard STA->AP configuration. If you want speed and don't need the
> extended WDS mesh coverage, I highly suggest _not_ running WDS.
>
> Some things, like VMWare, don't like to bridge over wireless devices.
> This is something else to consider. In this case, you can just IP route
> a segment and use some iptables to DNAT/SNAT to it.
>
> If you're just using a Linux gateway to bridging to client STAtions,
> brctl might work for you without incident.
>
> Anyway, good luck, have fun, and don't be afraid to run Kismet or
> tethereal on your interfaces to debug framing problems.
>
> - Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> http://ian.blenke.com/
>
>
>
>

This Gentoo how-to will work on most Linux systems, if the above methods don't.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml
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