if_bridge interface confuses Windows Small Business Server 2000

[Ashley Moran]

FreeBSD 6 came at the perfect time for me.  I've just switched my primary 
desktop from Win2k to FreeBSD, and I put the Windows boot disk in an old 
machine that was heading for the skip.

I wanted to access the W2k machine (fred) over VNC without flooding our 
switch, so I thought let's take advantage of the new features in REL 6...  I 
added a second ethernet card to my FreeBSD box (alfie) and configured a 
bridge in /etc/rc.conf:

	ifconfig_rl0="DHCP"
	ifconfig_rl1="up"
	cloned_interfaces="bridge0"
	ifconfig_bridge0="addm rl0 addm rl1 up"
	gateway_enable="YES"

SBS is configured to give a static DHCP lease of 192.168.0.181 to alfie; fred 
is dynamic and is currently 192.168.0.35.

At first everything seemed fine, and fred operates as if it was plugged 
straight into the network.  

But...

1) SBS sees both machines as alfie, even though it correctly reports the MAC 
addresses of each machine

2) On alfie, when I want to make a VNC connection to fred I have to type "vnc 
viewer alfie"(!)

3) On fred, if I ping alfie it returns 192.168.0.35 as the IP number, not 181 
which is the static lease.


I assume this is a bug in if_bridge, only because I assumed that bridge 
interfaces should be transparent (and act like a physical switch).

When we get some small switches in I'll use one to connect the two machines 
together, but I'd still like to work out what's going on here.  Am I doing 
something wrong?


Ashley