As part of tidying up “all those damn cables” and making it possible to walk around the study, I’ve been replacing the long 10+m cables I’ve used over recent years with shorter cross-over cables. Some of the newer NICs support automatic detection of the cable type & you can freely use normal cables instead of cross-over without issues. My soekris box unfortunately doesn’t support this with its 3 onboard NICs. Anyway, once I’ve got the cross-overs in place, the 2 workhorses, sendai & continuity, are wired directly into the soekris. Setting up a bridge was as easy as:

• reading the brconfig & bridgename.if man pages
• setting up hostname.ath0 with the desired IP & subnet
• configuring hostname.sis0 & sis1 with “up”
• and creating a simple bridgename.bridge0 linking the three interfaces, and accepting only IP traffic across them

The next step, getting PF to send the traffic the right way, proved a little more troublesome….