Wireless to wired bridge: apparently not going to work?

Alright. So the back room here at chateau Simon is having the floors
redone. Cheers for bursting hot water tank .

Problem is, that's one of the two rooms in the house with a phone
jack, and as the other one is a living room, that's where my network
and server empire has been located. Unfortunately, I can't move it
back in there for a week or two.

So anyway, while I've been able to rig everything back up in the other
room, my normal desktop PC remains much closer to that rear room, and
cannot realistically be moved to another room closer to the new
hookup. This leaves my main PC networkless, mostly function-less (as
all my shit is stored on my server) and internet-less. Need-less
(haHA!) to say, this is a shitter.

So, I figured why not make the most of a $1300 laptop, and turn it
into the equivalent of an $80 wireless adapter. Hell, I'm a University
student, I can spare that kind of cash, right?

Right, so, I plug it in. I get the laptop on the wireless, as my
router's a vicious bitch and will disconnect anything associated that
doesn't have an IP after 5 seconds (I can't figure out how to change
that behaviour either :/). I plug the cable into the PC. My goal is to
form a network bridge between the wireless (eth0) and wired (eth1)
interfaces on the laptop.

With bridging enabled, I issue:
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
brctl setfd br0 0 #set delay until the bridge goes to forwarding to 0
ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 #eth0 is wireless
dhclient br0

The bridge then gets an IP. All appears well; I can ping the internets
(router denies pinging local hosts when ping originates from
wireless), and I'm away with my bridge. So, I head to the main PC.
DHCP fails, so I figure I'll try static IP - given the tomfoolery my
router's taken place in so far, maybe it won't issue DHCP for some
reason.

With static IP in, I can now ping the bridge. I cannot, however, ping
the internet. Indeed, I have no route to the internet. I've ensured /
proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward is set to 1.

Ostensibly, my bridge isn't working. Google shows up nothing. Anyone
having issues resolved them with the ip_forward command. Now, either
I'm not understanding the fundamental idea of a bridge (I assume it is
similar to it's real life counterpart), or something else is iffy.
Anyone able to shed some light ?

For the record, I'm running Gentoo 2.6.20 on the laptop, and the
desktop is a Windows XP box. Gentoo has bridging support compiled as
a kernel module, which is loaded.

Cheers for any help ,
Simon

On Apr 28, 9:59 pm, nzf...@gmail.com wrote:
> Alright. So the back room here at chateau Simon is having the floors
> redone. Cheers for bursting hot water tank .
>
> Problem is, that's one of the two rooms in the house with a phone
> jack, and as the other one is a living room, that's where my network
> and server empire has been located. Unfortunately, I can't move it
> back in there for a week or two.
>
> So anyway, while I've been able to rig everything back up in the other
> room, my normal desktop PC remains much closer to that rear room, and
> cannot realistically be moved to another room closer to the new
> hookup. This leaves my main PC networkless, mostly function-less (as
> all my shit is stored on my server) and internet-less. Need-less
> (haHA!) to say, this is a shitter.
>
> So, I figured why not make the most of a $1300 laptop, and turn it
> into the equivalent of an $80 wireless adapter. Hell, I'm a University
> student, I can spare that kind of cash, right?
>
> Right, so, I plug it in. I get the laptop on the wireless, as my
> router's a vicious bitch and will disconnect anything associated that
> doesn't have an IP after 5 seconds (I can't figure out how to change
> that behaviour either :/). I plug the cable into the PC. My goal is to
> form a network bridge between the wireless (eth0) and wired (eth1)
> interfaces on the laptop.
>
> With bridging enabled, I issue:
> brctl addbr br0
> brctl addif br0 eth0
> brctl addif br0 eth1
> brctl setfd br0 0 #set delay until the bridge goes to forwarding to 0
> ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 #eth0 is wireless
> dhclient br0
>
> The bridge then gets an IP. All appears well; I can ping the internets
> (router denies pinging local hosts when ping originates from
> wireless), and I'm away with my bridge. So, I head to the main PC.
> DHCP fails, so I figure I'll try static IP - given the tomfoolery my
> router's taken place in so far, maybe it won't issue DHCP for some
> reason.
>
> With static IP in, I can now ping the bridge. I cannot, however, ping
> the internet. Indeed, I have no route to the internet. I've ensured /
> proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward is set to 1.
>
> Ostensibly, my bridge isn't working. Google shows up nothing. Anyone
> having issues resolved them with the ip_forward command. Now, either
> I'm not understanding the fundamental idea of a bridge (I assume it is
> similar to it's real life counterpart), or something else is iffy.
> Anyone able to shed some light ?
>
> For the record, I'm running Gentoo 2.6.20 on the laptop, and the
> desktop is a Windows XP box. Gentoo has bridging support compiled as
> a kernel module, which is loaded.
>
> Cheers for any help ,
> Simon

you need to activate the bridging - by typing ifconfig br0 up or
ifconfig br0 0.0.0.0 up

zaher el siddik
http://elsiddik.blogspot.com/