network bridging under ubuntu
this has been bugging me for the better part of a week. i don't expect anyone to care, i just needed to stash this somewhere and my samsite.ca wordpress install is suffering a nervous breakdown at the moment.
so i've been dicking about with iptables and nat and forwarding and yaddda blah pornmuffins. it's all voodoo. just like network printers and perl. anyways, turns out that there's a package called bridge-utils that makes this stupid simple. my desired setup is router --> ubuntu (eth0) <--> ubuntu (eth1) --> xbox 360. the 360 should sit on the same subnet as everything else plugged into router and dhcp should be addressing the whole shebang without any intervention.
so first off, i edited /etc/network/interfaces to include the following:auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
#
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
#
bridge_ports eth1 eth0
#
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
then i had to actually create the bridge:brctl addbr br0
brctl setfd br0 0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
ifconfig br0 up
dhclient br0
dhclient eth1
no idea if this will persist through a reboot but i think it should. either way, it wouldn't be the first time i had to force an ifup at boot. so far though, this bridge meets all my requirements and it's far more reliable than wifi. there's already an hdmi cable running along the wall, may as well run ethernet alongside it too.
so i've been dicking about with iptables and nat and forwarding and yaddda blah pornmuffins. it's all voodoo. just like network printers and perl. anyways, turns out that there's a package called bridge-utils that makes this stupid simple. my desired setup is router --> ubuntu (eth0) <--> ubuntu (eth1) --> xbox 360. the 360 should sit on the same subnet as everything else plugged into router and dhcp should be addressing the whole shebang without any intervention.
so first off, i edited /etc/network/interfaces to include the following:auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
#
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
#
bridge_ports eth1 eth0
#
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
then i had to actually create the bridge:brctl addbr br0
brctl setfd br0 0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
ifconfig br0 up
dhclient br0
dhclient eth1
no idea if this will persist through a reboot but i think it should. either way, it wouldn't be the first time i had to force an ifup at boot. so far though, this bridge meets all my requirements and it's far more reliable than wifi. there's already an hdmi cable running along the wall, may as well run ethernet alongside it too.