On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 18:58 -0500, Matthew Xavier wrote: > Your latter idea should work. For a while, I used an old K6-2 box to > bridge a couple of wired networks (I wanted to connect some newer > computers to an old coax network and couldn't find any PCI cards with > BNC connectors). I don't see any reason it wouldn't work just as > well if one of the interfaces is wireless. At the time I had to > patch the kernel, but it's included now, although I'm not sure if > your average distro kernel includes it. > > A Google search for "linux ethernet bridge howto" should turn up > information on what you're looking for. > > Xavier It won't work due to the 802.11 spec, you need two 4-frame capable WDS units to properly bridge between two wireless networks. A pair of wrt54g will do fine in WDS mode. It's complicated, but simply put, an 802.11 clients mac address is attached to the packets that it sends, which means all packets sourced from the client will appear to come from the same MAC. Some wireless client bridges (such as the gaming units for xbox or PS2) will clone the mac of whatever is plugged into it to overcome this, but it only works for one device. In WDS mode the source MAC address of the packet is sent in a seperate part of the packet than the source MAC address of the wireless frame, allowing you to bridge multiple computers behind a single wireless "client".