How to use if_bridge

[Fabian Keil]

Sten Daniel Sørsdal <lists at wm-access.no> wrote:

> Fabian Keil wrote:
> 
> > The example section has the following sentence "Such a con-
> > figuration could be used to implement a simple 802.11-to-Ethernet bridge
> > (assuming the 802.11 interface is in ad-hoc mode)."
> > 
> > I don't get the meaning of the ad-hoc mode part. In my tests if_bridge
> > worked in hostap mode as well, but failed in infrastructure mode. Could
> > you clarify if (or why not) bridging in infrastructure mode should work?
> 
> hostap should work, ad-hoc should work. by infrastructure you mean that
> the card operates as a 'station'? then it shouldn't work (correctly) as
> defined by the standard. commercial products tend to implement "mac-nat"
> or just simple dumb passthrough (which requires support on the ap side
> and is very much like ad-hoc mode).

By infrastructure mode I mean the card is connected to an access
point, in other words the default mode. 
 
> you would want to look into WDS for a standard way of dealing with
> bridging on 802.11

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not sure if it would help in my case.
Wikipedia says WDS "enables the interconnection of access points",
which is not what I wanted.

I tried if_bridge to let QEMU on my laptop talk to the wireless
network. It worked if the Laptop's NIC was in ad-hoc or hostap mode,
but failed if the NIC was connected to an access point.

NAT solved the problem, but I still don't understand why if_bridge
didn't work. If it was expected to fail I think it should be mentioned
in the man page.

Fabian
-- 
http://www.fabiankeil.de/
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