bridged ipfw problem in FreeBSD 5.2beta

[Jon Simola]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Ganbold wrote:

> Thanks for reply. How can check bridge collision?

Error messages of that type are usually logged to syslog, you might be
able to find something in /var/log/messages

> One strange thing is even after reboot bridge doesn't work. Traffics
> from outside is coming to external interface but there is no traffic
> coming to internal interface.

No traffic to the internal interface? Do you mean that the bridge is not
forwarding traffic, or that your internal interface is not receiving
packets from the switch?

Try enabling bridge debugging and rebuild the kernel. This will help a
lot.

diff for /usr/src/sys/net/bridge.c:
197c197
< #define DEB(x)
---
> #define DEB(x) x
210c210
< #if 0 /* debugging only */
---
> #if 1 /* debugging only */



> I rebooted several times, even I tried manually restart ipfw like
> /etc/rc.d/ipfw restart.

That doesn't appear to do anything. The /etc/rc.d/ipfw script looks like a
fancy wrapper that twiddles the sysctl net.inet.ip.fw.enable

> But no luck. Then I disconnected cable from external card and connected
> directly to my switch Cisco 4006 in order to pass all traffic directly
> without bridge. It of course worked. Then I disconnected back the cable
> and connected again to bridge machine external network card again. It
> didn't work. Then I tried to restart ipfw and it worked again luckily.

I had a lot of problems similar to this when trying to get my machine in
place. The bridging code learns MAC addresses on an interface, and doesn't
play nicely when things are changed. When you reboot the bridge, be sure
to reboot all the switches, that caused me a lot of confusion
when I first started.

At the time, I was facing problems with a pair of Intel 82540EM 1000BaseT
nics which were doing bad things. I found a PR with a patch that disables
hardware checksumming on those cards but haven't had a chance to try them
again.

---
Jon Simola <jon at abccom.bc.ca> | "In the near future - corporate networks
    Systems Administrator     |  reach out to the stars, electrons and light
     ABC  Communications      |  flow throughout the universe." -- GITS