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16.3. Pseudo-bridges with Proxy-ARP

If you just want to implement a Pseudo-bridge, skip down a few sections to 'Implementing it', but it is wise to read a bit about how it works in practice.

A Pseudo-bridge works a bit differently. By default, a bridge passes packets unaltered from one interface to the other. It only looks at the hardware address of packets to determine what goes where. This in turn means that you can bridge traffic that Linux does not understand, as long as it has an hardware address it does.

A 'Pseudo-bridge' works differently and looks more like a hidden router than a bridge, but like a bridge, it has little impact on network design.

An advantage of the fact that it is not a bridge lies in the fact that packets really pass through the kernel, and can be filtered, changed, redirected or rerouted.

A real bridge can also be made to perform these feats, but it needs special code, like the Ethernet Frame Diverter, or the above mentioned patch.

Another advantage of a pseudo-bridge is that it does not pass packets it does not understand - thus cleaning your network of a lot of cruft. In cases where you need this cruft (like SAP packets, or Netbeui), use a real bridge.

16.3.1. ARP & Proxy-ARP

When a host wants to talk to another host on the same physical network segment, it sends out an Address Resolution Protocol packet, which, somewhat simplified, reads like this 'who has 10.0.0.1, tell 10.0.0.7'. In response to this, 10.0.0.1 replies with a short 'here' packet.

10.0.0.7 then sends packets to the hardware address mentioned in the 'here' packet. It caches this hardware address for a relatively long time, and after the cache expires, it re-asks the question.

When building a Pseudo-bridge, we instruct the bridge to reply to these ARP packets, which causes the hosts in the network to send its packets to the bridge. The bridge then processes these packets, and sends them to the relevant interface.

So, in short, whenever a host on one side of the bridge asks for the hardware address of a host on the other, the bridge replies with a packet that says 'hand it to me'.

This way, all data traffic gets transmitted to the right place, and always passes through the bridge.

16.3.2. Implementing it

In the bad old days, it used to be possible to instruct the Linux Kernel to perform 'proxy-ARP' for just any subnet. So, to configure a pseudo-bridge, you would have to specify both the proper routes to both sides of the bridge AND create matching proxy-ARP rules. This is bad in that it requires a lot of typing, but also because it easily allows you to make mistakes which make your bridge respond to ARP queries for networks it does not know how to route.

With Linux 2.4/2.5 (and possibly 2.2), this possibility has been withdrawn and has been replaced by a flag in the /proc directory, called 'proxy_arp'. The procedure for building a pseudo-bridge is then:

  1. Assign an IP address to both interfaces, the 'left' and the 'right' one

  2. Create routes so your machine knows which hosts reside on the left, and which on the right

  3. Turn on proxy-ARP on both interfaces, echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/ethL/proxy_arp, echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/ethR/proxy_arp, where L and R stand for the numbers of your interfaces on the left and on the right side

Also, do not forget to turn on the ip_forwarding flag! When converting from a true bridge, you may find that this flag was turned off as it is not needed when bridging.

Another thing you might note when converting is that you need to clear the arp cache of computers in the network - the arp cache might contain old pre-bridge hardware addresses which are no longer correct.

On a Cisco, this is done using the command 'clear arp-cache', under Linux, use 'arp -d ip.address'. You can also wait for the cache to expire manually, which can take rather long.

You can speed this up using the wonderful 'arping' tool, which on many distributions is part of the 'iputils' package. Using 'arping' you can send out unsolicited ARP messages so as to update remote arp caches.

This is a very powerful technique that is also used by 'black hats' to subvert your routing!

Note

On Linux 2.4, you may need to execute 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_nonlocal_bind' before being able to send out unsolicited ARP messages!

You may also discover that your network was misconfigured if you are/were of the habit of specifying routes without netmasks. To explain, some versions of route may have guessed your netmask right in the past, or guessed wrong without you noticing. When doing surgical routing like described above, it is *vital* that you check your netmasks!

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