openindiana bridging problem (brctl)

Hello all,

I was trying to hooking up several computers into my openindiana server box, the server box has few RJ45 gigabit ethernet. The desired hierarchy of the network will be shown as on the picture attached. I would like to connect each host into my gigabit ethernet because of me and my brother want to put all our files into this server, hence the speed would be maintained at 1 gb/s (~100mbyte/s file transfer rate), but then we wouldn't be able to join our computers' network together. Came up an idea to bridge the connections to our computer inside the openindiana server box by software.

After had a lot of reading and researching over the internet, I found out that I have to use 'brctl' command to create the bridging connection. By default this feature isn't implemented, so that I would need to install ethbridge-0.9 from opensolaris website (can be downloaded by clicking view > attachment on the website
hub (dot) opensolaris (dot) org /bin/view/Project+ethbridge/files

The problem arise here when I install the package, when I 'make' the package, I got an error saying that the file is unable to be compiled (I couldn't regenerate the error). Thus I tried to 'make install' the package under (super user)

# make install

it also didn't work, but when I used (non super user with 'sudo')

$ sudo make install

it works!

Hence, I got my brctl installed. I tried to install the driver for the bridge by inputing:

$ sudo add_drv bridge

Giving an output of:
Driver (bridge) is already installed.

But when I went to /devices/pseudo/
I can 'only' see a folder called bridge@0, the file called bridge@0:0 is missing!

I also tried different methods
update_drv bridge

and

rem_drv bridge then followed by add_drv bridge

They didn't work.....

Another problem arised when I tried to create the bridge by inputing the command:

$ sudo bridge addbr mybridge

or

# bridge addbr mybdrige

Giving an output of:
brctl: open(/devices/pseudo/bridge@0:0) failed: No such file or directory

After done another research on ethbridge-0.9 on the internet, I found it out that this package didn't work on Solaris S10u1 (Solaris 10 01/06)
mail (dot) opensolaris (dot) org/pipermail/ethbridge-discuss/2006-January/000000 (dot) html

The goal:
I just only want to bridge two of my ethernet in this openindiana server box so that each computer could:

  1. see each other in the same network
  2. have up/downlink 1gb/s to the server box.

I am not closed only to this bridging solutions, if you have any different solution that satisfy the requirements above please shoot.

Any help/solutions would be very appreciated. :slight_smile:

Have a good one guys.

to moderator: sorry, I have upload the link so that the other user know what I am trying to explain.

Isn't OpenIndiana supporting

dladm create-bridge

and

dladm add-bridge

commands out of the box ?

1 Like

Oh, you are correct. That was weird, I keep searching about bridge and always get a result with brctl not dladm. Thanks alot!

update:
I finally managed to create a bridge between the two ethernet ports, but I got another problem to set up my openindiana server box to behave as a router.
The openindiana server box will also routing 2 different subnets, so that they could connect to internet (I forgot to mention the eth3 in the earlier attachment).

Internet will be connected to the eth0 side of the server box.

I would like to set up 2 subnets under this server box,
1 st subnetwork = 192.168.1.000/25, (eth1 and eth2 are bridged under this subnet)
2nd subnetwork = 192.168.1.128/25, another guest computer (eth3) will be connected under this subnet.

The job of the server box is then to act as a router for the 2 subnets.
I am confused how to setup such thing on my server box because of the bridge is actually done in the openindiana server box and yet there is another router to be done on top of it.
Can I use VNIC for the "???" in the attachment. Normally its just another ethernet port of the router.
or
is it possible for me to just ignore the bridging, so there is no bridge over the host1 and host2?

The reason I set the network in this way because we want put the host3 maybe as WLAN access point and we only want the first subnet where host1 and host2 connected to be able to access to our printing server and our samba server.

Im sorry if the question is abit silly as I am quite new into networking.

Thanks for the response and suggestions :slight_smile: