From: Kristian Hoffmann (khoff_at_pc-intouch.com)
Date: 2002-03-04 08:13:08 UTC
We used to bridge our wireless network which included 7 T1s and ~10 access
points. The amount of broadcast traffic being generated and needlessly
broadcast over the wireless portion of our network was disgusting.
Instead of playing with BREPF (Bridged Ethernet Packet Filtering, I
think), we decided to do something that didn't crash our routers on a
regular basis. Routing. It was/is a painful process to switch but it was
worth it in our case. And yes, dhcp relay agents play an important part
in making that work. There was a definite advantage to bridging in the
beginning. But as the network got larger it's drawbacks became very
visible. I have to appologize for being so negitive towards bridging but
I wasted a lot of valuable time trying to get WDS to work before giving up
on it. The only case I can think of where bridging is absolutely
necessary is if you want to run PPPoE over a multiple wireless networks
linked together. I don't think there is any way to route ppp packets
unless you somehow manage to do PPPoEoIPoE. :P
-Kristian
On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Jim Thompson wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 03:20:04AM -0600, Jim Thompson wrote:
> >
> > I'd love to look at the code. Routing isn't *always* possible.
> >
> > Jim
>
> Could you name some your top instances of this?
>
> The main one is 'wireless extension'.
>
> ethernet <--> WDS <--> WDS <--> WDS <--> ethernet
>
> One in particular i'm thinking of is where i have an antenna
> shooting into a coffee house down the street, and want to put an openap
> in there, but have my dhcp server in my apartment. So forwarding dhcp
> requests from openap to smc(prism2 card) card in pc sitting by window
> is what i desire. I have set up an openap and am getting familiar
> with what it can/can't do. Possibly i could forward the request via
> routing foo or the linux regular ethernet bridging but then the only
> device i'm going to have is the prism card in the openap so probably
> i'm stuck with WDS 802.11 foo, but still figuring.
>
> In this instance you can run a DHCP relay on the openap box inside the coffee shop,
> and have the dhcp server in your apartment service the requests.
>
>