3. BRIDGING

3.1 Software

Get the bridge configuration utility from Alan Cox's home pages. This is the same reference as in Chris' document. I just didn't realize that it was an ftp and not an http URL ...

3.2 Prior Reading.

Read the Multiple Ethernet HOWTO for some advice on getting more than one network card recognized and configured.

Yet more details of the kind of boot magic that you may need are in the Boot Prompt HOWTO.

You may be able to get away without the NET-2 HOWTO. It is a good long read and you will have to pick from it the details you need.

3.3 Boot configuration

The reading material above will tell you that you need to prepare the kernel to recognize a second ethernet device at boot up by adding this to your /etc/lilo.conf, and then re-run lilo:

append = "ether=0,0,eth1" 

Note the "eth1". "eth0" is the first card. "eth1" is the second card. You can always add the boot parameters in your response to the line that lilo offers you. This is for three cards:

linux ether=0,0,eth1 ether=0,0,eth2 

I use loadlin to boot my kernel from DOS:

loadlin.exe c:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 ro ether=0,0,eth1 ether=0,0,eth2 

Note that this trick makes the kernel probe at bootup. That will not happen if you load the ethernet drivers as modules (for safety since the probe order can't be determined) so if you use modules you will have to add the appropriate IRQ and port parameters for the driver in your /etc/conf.modules. I have at least

alias eth0 3c509
alias eth1 de620
options 3c509 irq=5 io=0x210
options de620 irq=7 bnc=1

You can tell if you use modules by using ``ps -aux'' to see if kerneld is running and checking that there are .o files in a subdirectory of your /lib/modules directory. You want the directory named with what uname -r tells you. If you have kerneld and/or you have a foo.o then edit /etc/conf.modules and read the man page for depmod carefully.

Note also that until recently (kernel 2.0.25) the 3c509 driver could not be used for more than one card if used as a module. I have seen a patch floating around that fixes the oversight. It may be in the kernel when you read this.

3.4 Kernel configuration

Recompile the kernel with bridging enabled.

CONFIG_BRIDGE=y 

I also compiled with firewalling and IP-forwarding and -masquerading and the rest enabled. Only if you want firewalling too ...

CONFIG_FIREWALL=y           
CONFIG_NET_ALIAS=y          
CONFIG_INET=y               
CONFIG_IP_FORWARD=y         
CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y       
CONFIG_IP_FIREWALL=y        
CONFIG_IP_FIREWALL_VERBOSE=y
CONFIG_IP_MASQUERADE=y      

You don't need all of this. What you do need apart from this is the standard net configuration:

CONFIG_NET=y 

and I do not think you need worry about any of the other networking options. I have any options that I did not actually compile into the kernel available through kernel modules that I can add in later.

Install the new kernel in place, rerun lilo and reboot with the new kernel. Nothing should have changed at this point!

3.5 Network addresses

Chris says that a bridge should not have an IP address but that is not the setup to be described here.

You are going to want to use the machine for connecting to the net so you need an address and you need to make sure that you have the loopback device configured in the normal way so that your software can talk to the places they expect to be able to talk to. If loopback is down the name resolver or other net sevices might fail. See the NET-2-HOWTO, but your standard configuration should already have done this bit:

ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 route add -net 127.0.0.0 

You will have to give addresses to your network cards. I altered the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 file in my slackware (3.x) to setup two cards and you should also essentially just look for your net configuration file and double or treble the number of instructions in it. Suppose that you already have an address at

192.168.2.100 

(that is in the private net reserved address space, but never mind - it won't hurt anybody if you use this address by mistake) then you probably already have a line like

ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 metric 1 

in your configuration. The first thing you are going to probably want to do is cut the address space reached by this card in half so that you can eventually bridge or firewall the two halves. So add a line which reduces the mask to address a smaller number of machines:

ifconfig eth0 netmask 255.255.255.128 

Try it too. That restricts the card to at most the address space between .0 and .127.

Now you can set your second card up in the other half of the local address space. Make sure that nobody already has the address. For symmetry I set it at 228=128+100 here. Any address will do so long as it is not in the other card's mask, and even then, well, maybe. Avoid special addresses like .0, .1, .128 etc. unless you really know what you are doing.

ifconfig eth1 192.168.2.228 netmask 255.255.255.128 metric 1 

That restricts the second card to addresses between .128 and .255.

3.6 Network routing

This is where I have to announce the caveats in the bridging + firewalling scheme: you cannot firewall packets which are not routed. No routes, no firewall. At least this appears to be true in the 2.0.30 and more recent kernels. The firewalling filters are closely involved with the ip-forwarding code.

That does not mean that you cannot bridge. You can bridge between two cards and firewall them from a third. You can have only two cards and firewall both of them against an outside IP such as a nearby router, provided that the router is routed by you to exactly one of the cards.

In other words, since I will be doing firewalling, so I want to precisely control the physical destination of some packets.

I have the small net of machines attached to a hub hanging off eth0, so I configure a net there:

route add -net 192.168.2.128 netmask 255.255.255.128 dev eth0 

The 128 would be 0 if I had a full class C network there. I don't, by definition, since I just halved the address space. The "dev eth0" is not necessary here because the cards address falls within the mask, but it may be necessary for you. One might need more than one card holding up this subnet (127 machines on one segment, oh yeah) but those cards would be being bridged under the same netmask so that they appear as one to the routing code.

On the other card I have a line going straight through to a big router that I trust.

                                             client 129
         __                                        |    __ 
client 1   \    .0                    .128         |   /   net 1
client 2 --- Hub - eth0 - Kernel - eth1 - Hub - Router --- net 2
client 3 __/       .100            .228         .2 |   \__ net 3
                                                   |
                                             client 254 

I attach the address of the router to that card as a fixed ("static") route because it would otherwise fall within the first cards netmask and the kernel would be thinking wrongly about how to send packets to the big router. I will want to firewall these packets and that is another reason fow wanting to route them specifically.

route add 192.168.2.2 dev eth1 

I don't need it, since I don't have any more machines in that half of the address space, but I declare a net also on the second card. Separating my interfaces into two sets via routing will allow me to do very tight firewalling eventually , but you can get away with far less routing than this.

route add -net 192.168.2.128 netmask 255.255.255.128 dev eth1 

I also need to send all non-local packets out to the world so I tell the kernel to send them to the big router

route add default gw 192.168.2.2 

3.7 Card configuration

So much was standard networking setup, but we are bridging so we also have to listen on both (?) cards for packets that are not aimed at us. The following should go into the network configuration file.

ifconfig promisc eth0 ifconfig promisc eth1 

The man page says allmulti=promisc, but it didn't work for me.

3.8 Additional routing

One thing that I noticed was that I had to put at least the second card into a mode where it would respond to the big router's questions about which machines I was hiding in my local net.

ifconfig arp eth1 

For good measure I did this to the other card too.

ifconfig arp eth0. 

3.9 Bridge Configuration

Put bridging enabling on and into your configuration file:

brcfg -enable 

You should have been trying this out in real time all along, of course! The bridge configure will bring up some numbers. You can experiment with turning on and off the ports one at a time

brcfg -port 0 -disable/-enable
 brcfg -port 1 -disable/-enable 

You get status reports anytime by just running

brcfg 

without any parameters. You will see that the bridge listens,learns, and then does forwarding. (I don't understand why the code repeats the same hardware addresses for both my cards, but never mind .. Chris' howto say that is OK)

3.10 Try it out

If you are still up and running as things are, try out your configuration script for real by taking down both cards and then executing it:

ifconfig eth0 down ifconfig eth1 down /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 

With any luck the various subsystems (nfs, ypbind, etc.) won't notice. Do not try this unless you are sitting at the keyboard!

If you want to be more careful than this, you should take down as many daemons as possible beforehand, and unmount nfs directories. The worst that can happen is that you have to reboot in single-user mode (the "single" parameter to lilo or loadlin), and take out your changes before rebooting with things the way they were before you started.

3.11 Checks

Verify that there is different traffic on each interface:

tcpdump -i eth0

(in one window)

tcpdump -i eth1

(in another window)

You should get used to using tcpdump to look for things that should not be happening or that are happening and should not.

For instance look for packets that have gone through the bridge to the second card from the internal net. Here I am looking for packets from the machine with address .22:

tcpdump -i eth1 -e host 192.168.2.22

Then send a ping from the .22 host to the router. You should see the packet reported by tcpdump.

At this stage you should have a bridge ready that also has two network addreses. Test that you can ping them from outside and inside your local net, and that you can telnet and ftp around between inside and outside too.

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Generated: 2007-01-26 17:58:08