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/
