I've got a simple bridge to a WiFi card working slowly, but I've got
questions.
I used a bridge with pf about 8 years ago very successfully, but it was a
dedicated firewall machine with 3 network cards (promisc in & out, control
on a fixed IP). It baffles me how it's possible to take 2 working
interfaces and put them into a bridge. Each still has an IP address and
responds individually, yet ifconfig shows them as promiscuous and the bridge
works.
Second question: why is this bridge so slow? It works in name only, it's
too slow to be of any practical use. I timed 43 seconds for a WiFi client
to load what's basically the Apache "It Worked!" page from a machine on my
LAN. Pinging the WiFi client from the LAN takes about 3 ms average. I'm not
sure if I'm getting a slow WiFi speed, but the antennas are less than 5 feet
apart so far.
Another that shows my lack of networking knowledge: If I have the
hostname.if file assigning an IP to the WiFi card that's in the same
192.168.0.0/24 block as the rest of the LAN, nothing can ping anything. If
I take the IP out of the hostname.if file so it's just setting media, nwid,
etc., everything works but DHCPD won't attach to it on boot. I can have
another machine running DHCPD and that works. Even without the bridge up
having 2 interfaces in the same machine in the same /24 block brings
everything down and I don't understand why.
My ifconfig output looks like:
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 33196
priority: 0
groups: lo
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
ath0: flags=8963<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu
1500
lladdr 00:0d:88:c8:80:21
priority: 4
groups: wlan
media: IEEE802.11 autoselect hostap (autoselect mode 11b hostap)
status: active
ieee80211: nwid "nixers gx270" chan 10 bssid 00:0d:88:c8:80:21
inet6 fe80::20d:88ff:fec8:8021%ath0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
em0: flags=8b43<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,ALLMULTI,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu
1500
lladdr 00:0d:56:95:fe:df
priority: 0
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex,rxpause,txpause)
status: active
inet 192.168.0.7 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
inet6 fe80::20d:56ff:fe95:fedf%em0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
enc0: flags=0<>
priority: 0
groups: enc
status: active
pflog0: flags=141<UP,RUNNING,PROMISC> mtu 33196
priority: 0
groups: pflog
bridge0: flags=41<UP,RUNNING>
groups: bridge
priority 32768 hellotime 2 fwddelay 15 maxage 20 holdcnt 6 proto rstp
ath0 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
port 1 ifpriority 0 ifcost 0
em0 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
port 2 ifpriority 0 ifcost 0
No, I'm not running any WiFi security yet.
Alan
