fbsd briding && routing

rado rado at cablebg.net
Sun May 18 00:56:55 PDT 2003


Hi, 

I've got a FreeBSD box with 4 Ethernet interfaces. What I tried to achieve 
is making three ot them (xl0, xl1, xl2) part of a bridging cluster, and the 
last one is my Internet connection. So, basically the idea behind all this 
is using the box as an integrated routing and bridging mashine. The setup is 
someting like this: 


                                           xl0: no IP
Internet <--->  | ISP IP Addr.              xl1: 192.168.1.1
                                           xl2: no IP
All the machines have 192.168.1/24 addreses, as I want to see each other 
directly through bridging. xl1 has 192.168.1.1 as a default gw for all the 
machines. 

Everyting works just fine, for all intranet communication, between these 
three ethernet segments. The problem is when there's a sesion between 
internal machine and internet, and only for machines on xl0 and xl2 (every 
unnumbered interface). The problem, as I see it, is becuase FreeBSD tries to 
forward the packet, according to its routing tables (normall!!), and this 
always points to xl1 interface. But this prevent the machine on xl0/xl2 from 
seeing the packet, obviously the bridging is skipped this way. 

I wonder, is it logical to have net.link.ether.bridge turned on, and have 
the normal routing applied for packets with destination IPs on one of the 
bridge-cluster interfaces,skipping all unnumbered ifaces. 



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