Re: [Madwifi-users] [Fwd: bridging problem]

[warlord <wa...@bl...>]

Trouble with bridging lies with limitations of 802.11 protocol. It is 
very well documented problem, both on madwifi sites and sites of other 
wireless driver developers. WDS protocol was designed to overcome this 
problem, but 90% of factory made devices do not use WDS in full (i.e. 
they do not use 4 MAC address headers). Madwifi is 100% WDS compliant 
and that creates incompatibility problems with other devices which are 
not 100% compliant.
Any wireless card CAN be bridged only in master (AP) mode.

StarOS can bridge wireless cards, but I think they use something like 
Proxy ARP instead of true 802.1d bridging.



Simon Wong wrote:
> It's also interesting to note the following symptoms I found too:
> 
> - If I don't add the wireless iface into a bridge, the wireless device 
> responds perfectly. So I know I have the right SSID, etc.
> 
> - if I add the wireless iface to the bridge and assign an IP addr to the 
> bridge, I can ping the bridge perfectly as long as I turn on WDS through 
> iwpriv. If I don't turn on WDS on both the AP and STA, nothing goes through.
> 
> - Using Ethereal, I can confirm that ping requests were not received at 
> the destination. This means there's something weird in the bridge where 
> 50% of the packets are being dropped. But I don't think Linux bridging 
> is broken...
>
>>
>