Network Card Strangeness

[Jonathan Allen]

Paul,

> If your machine is to act as a router, you're splitting your LAN into
> separate subnets and your router will need an IP address in each subnet.
> Now you're saying it's a bridge, which is an entirely different thing,
> effectively "glueing" the separate networks into one. You don't need
> multiple IP addresses for a bridge (you don't actually need *any*).

Perhaps I got confused by the terminology.  As always, I know what I
thought I said, or intended to say, but you didn't hear what I thought
I was saying.  I'm sorry to have caused confusion ...

     100BaseT Machines <------> Bridge/Router <-------> One 10BaseT machine
                                   |     |
More 100BaseT Machines <-----------|     |------------> One 100BaseT machine

One network, one set of IP addresses (actually already in use, but all
running at 10BaseT speeds).

> Try http://bridge.sourceforge.net/howto.html for more details on bridging.

This solution would absolutely work for me.  I'd have to have the Bridge
machine itself participating in the network, but the 'howto' tells how
to do that.

In an ideal world, I would like to inhibit traffic from the fast machines
being bridged onto the slow machines' part of the network unless it is
actually directed to them so as to maximise the bandwidth on that part of
the network, but I can live without that feature.

Does that sound right now ?

Jonathan