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" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Network Dude >http://www.typo.org/~web/ >
