[ath9k-devel] ath9k in bridge?

[ath9k-devel] ath9k in bridge?

[Paul Koan]

Hello,

I have an ath9k in a bridge; the other network card is a 3com 
wired nic.

Basically the setup is that I have a media centre PC 
connected to the rest of my network over wifi, and my new TV 
has an wired port.  So my plan was to plug the TV into the 
media centre, bridge the wired and wifi interfaces, thereby 
giving the TV access to the network and internet.

The TV can see the uPnP server on the media PC that it is 
directly connected to, but cannot see the rest of the 
network.

If I tcpdump on the eth and wlan interfaces, I can see its 
arp requests appear on both interfaces - so the bridge is 
seemingly working at the OS level.

But the arp doesn't make it out to the rest of the network. 
The ath9k card is connected to a Linksys WRT610N, flashed 
with dd-wrt, so I can run tcpdump on it.

I don't see the arp requests coming from the media PC arrive 
at the wrt610N.

I have read that some wifi card drivers do not support 
forwarding packets that have a different source MAC address 
than the card itself.  Is this the case with the ath9k 
drivers, or could something else be getting in the way?

Thanks,

Paul

[ath9k-devel] ath9k in bridge?

[Jordan Thoms]

I've also been having issues with ath9k/hostap in a bridge, it works
at first but after some time packets stop getting from the wlan0
interface to the br0 interface. (I can see them in tcpdump on wlan0,
but not on br0).

Cheers
Jordan

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Paul Koan <gmane@airbred.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have an ath9k in a bridge; the other network card is a 3com
> wired nic.
>
> Basically the setup is that I have a media centre PC
> connected to the rest of my network over wifi, and my new TV
> has an wired port. ?So my plan was to plug the TV into the
> media centre, bridge the wired and wifi interfaces, thereby
> giving the TV access to the network and internet.
>
> The TV can see the uPnP server on the media PC that it is
> directly connected to, but cannot see the rest of the
> network.
>
> If I tcpdump on the eth and wlan interfaces, I can see its
> arp requests appear on both interfaces - so the bridge is
> seemingly working at the OS level.
>
> But the arp doesn't make it out to the rest of the network.
> The ath9k card is connected to a Linksys WRT610N, flashed
> with dd-wrt, so I can run tcpdump on it.
>
> I don't see the arp requests coming from the media PC arrive
> at the wrt610N.
>
> I have read that some wifi card drivers do not support
> forwarding packets that have a different source MAC address
> than the card itself. ?Is this the case with the ath9k
> drivers, or could something else be getting in the way?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
>
> _______________________________________________
> ath9k-devel mailing list
> ath9k-devel at lists.ath9k.org
> https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
>

[ath9k-devel] ath9k in bridge?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sun, 2009-10-18 at 21:08 -0700, Paul Koan wrote:
> But the arp doesn't make it out to the rest of the network.
> The ath9k card is connected to a Linksys WRT610N, flashed
> with dd-wrt, so I can run tcpdump on it.
> 
> I don't see the arp requests coming from the media PC arrive
> at the wrt610N.
> 
> I have read that some wifi card drivers do not support
> forwarding packets that have a different source MAC address
> than the card itself.  Is this the case with the ath9k
> drivers, or could something else be getting in the way?

This is not a driver limitation; the IEEE 802.11 protocol itself does
not support such a mechanism when the WLAN card is in managed mode
(connected to an AP). You could use bridging if you were to run ath9k in
AP mode, but that does not sound like something that would fit in nicely
with your setup. The other option could be to use WDS (4-address frame
format) links which could also providing bridging. Though, I do not know
whether they can currently be used with mac80211 and/or ath9k.

- Jouni