I agree, however there are some implementations of this type of bridging that 'routing' would not be a good substitute for. Say mangling traffic going outbound for compression purposes (A La Redline (Yes I know redline does proxying and not bridging)). I guess my best question would be, is there a solution to the problem. Maybe a possible way of bridging the traffic without polluting the world with unnecessary broadcasts of MAC addresses and over-head ethernet frames. (Is there a way to strip that garbage from the outbound traffic generated by the bridge). Greg ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: "Wayne E. Bouchard" <web@typo.org> Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 12:49:38 -0700

This goes back to traditional bridging issues.

The problems include:

loops and ineffective or broken STP implementations

arp and broadcast storms

mac address collisions

which version of bridging to use and their associated advantages and disatvantages.

I can't see that adding the capacity to do traffic shaping or filtering changes any of these issues. It just adds to the complexity. It still holds that, generally speaking, if you can route instead of bridging, it's a better option.

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 01:36:48PM -0600, Gregory Taylor wrote:

...

I have a question and would like all of your opinions on this matter, as I research heavily into stateful ethernet bridging, packet mangling and their advantages and disadvantages to local and wide area network topologies.

Deployed in large volumes, what negative effects, if any, would ethernet and fiber bridges have on the Internet as a whole.

Lets say I was to build a bridge designed to intercept and manipulate traffic coming in from an outside network into my 'colo site' to do traffic shaping, packet filtering, and ethernet frames manipulation. And I deployed 100s of these into the facility as a means to control overall traffic. Would these transparent bridges be detrimental in any way to the rest of the internet. I understand that since they are re-transmitting data that the possibility of their MAC addresses popping up every time a machine behind it pops up could be an issue when doing network monitoring. But I'd just like to know what everyone thinks about such products.

(Excuse me if my statements seem a little incoherent, I just woke up)

Greg

--- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/