When using brctl, my latency on the notebook that is doing the bridging becomes horribly slow. Eventually, I cannot get the notebook to connect to anything, even the routers admin panel, or pinging the router.
The scenario is I have an 802.11b router upstairs, an 802.11b card in my notebook, and an eth port in my notebook. I am setting up the link using the following:
gary@fluffy:~$ sudo ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0
gary@fluffy:~$ sudo ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0
gary@fluffy:~$ sudo su
root@fluffy:/home/gary# brctl addbr br0
root@fluffy:/home/gary# brctl addif br0 ath0
root@fluffy:/home/gary# brctl addif br0 eth0
root@fluffy:/home/gary# dhclient br0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.1.1
Copyright 2004-2008 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/br0/<removed>
Sending on LPF/br0/<removed>
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.0.6 from 192.168.0.1
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.6 on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.6 from 192.168.0.1
* Reloading /etc/samba/smb.conf smbd only
...done.
bound to 192.168.0.6 -- renewal in 39109 seconds.
root@fluffy:/home/gary# ifconfig br0 up
This works great at first. The eth0 port allows the other device to connect, and the notebook can still connect to the web just fine. But after 4 hours or so, the notebook times out to EVERYTHING. It's happened every time I've tried it so far, 4 total.
I can understand the latency, as it has to accept a ton of extra work to connect the device on eth0 to the network, but WHY does it keep timing out like this? And why does it only do it after 4 hours? Google has turned up NOTHING, which is disappointing.