Networking : how to bridge two NICs to share internet access ?

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Wed Aug 24 19:27:47 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 15:10 -0400, Matt Patterson wrote:
> ...on old debian systems you installed a package called ipmasq. There was 
> basically no configuration neeeded and it worked very well, used it for 
> many years on a server box.

Thanks matt. Didn't find this 'ipmasq' package in Synpatic, but I
searched for 'bridge ethernet' and it gave me a package called
"bridge-utils".
According to the description, it looks like it's designed fo rthat kind
of job : 

****
Utilities for configuring the Linux ethernet bridge
This package contains utilities for configuring the Linux ethernet
bridge in Linux 2.4 or later. The Linux ethernet bridge can be used
for connecting multiple ethernet devices together. The connecting is
fully transparent: hosts connected to one ethernet device see hosts
connected to the other ethernet devices directly.
****

I installed it, it contain only a tiny program called 'brctl' (for
BRidgeConTroL I guess...). Had a look at the man page, seems to be
exactly what I need. 
Can't wait for my buddy to bring his laptop and a network cable so we
can try this :-)

However, I am tad disappointed that this package does it all for me. I
was secretly hoping I could do it by fiddling with a few config files so
I can get a better understanding of networking in Linux, and learn a
little something in the process. But maybe it's too complicated and I
should just be glad that a magical package is there to do the dirty job
for me...
The package is actually in 'main', so it probably means that it's what
everybody uses for this job, and that it works well. 


--
Vince





More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list