[plug] bridged firewall

[Ben Jensz]

Hi all,

I'm just curious as to whether anyone has done any "playing" (or 
actively uses) Linux to act as a bridging firewall (rather than a routed 
firewall)?

As I read it, the Linux kernel (2.4 series) has the bridging code part 
of it built-in, so that side of things is fairly trivial to setup, but 
the packets don't pass through iptables at all, so that requires the 
kernel to be patched (patch can be found here:  
http://bridge.sourceforge.net/ ).  The documentation seems to be pretty 
sparse / incomplete.. so I just was wondering whether anyone else had 
done anything along these lines before with Linux and came across any 
"gotchas" etc.?

I haven't done anything much with it myself at the moment as I only have 
an old, pretty slow almost-bin-material work machine with which to muck 
around with it on, so compiling anything on it takes a month of Sundays 
(my firewall box would've been great - but alas I gutted it recently to 
build my brother a computer).

So has anyone tried it before?

TIA.


/ Ben