0

I have good WiFi and a couple of servers that have Ethernet interfaces. I would like to use e.g. a Raspberry Pi to connect to my existing good WiFi and then provide Ethernet network access with a cheap Ethernet switch. I'd like to avoid NAT, since the other WiFi clients need to be able to see the servers on the Ethernet.

Part of my problem is that I'm not sure what such a setup is called. Is this a WiFi-Ethernet-bridge?

I've bought a D-Link DAP-1620 "Wifi Extender" and it works most of the time, but it looses connectivity every 48 hours or so and requires a power-cycle... = Garbage.

But other than that, it does excactly what I need.

So I thought: How about using a Raspberry Pi?

I thought "Lets just setup a bridge between wlan0 and eth0", but it is not as simple as that, as pointed out in:

https://wiki.debian.org/BridgeNetworkConnections#Bridging_with_a_wireless_NIC

That section goes on to document how to use ebtables and requires knowledge of every Ethernet host's IP and MAC addresses.

But is there a solution using e.g. a Raspberry Pi so that the WiFi-to-Ethernet bridge is completely transparent to the Ethernet hosts, so DHCP and every other protocol under the sun will work? Apart from needing periodic reboots (AARRRRRHHHH), the D-Link does it perfectly...

Similar posts:

Peter V. Mørch
  • 613
  • 5
  • 11
  • TL;DR: Wifi is not Ethernet. If your RPi is an Access Point, you can consider bridging Wifi with Ethernet. If your RPi is a STAtion client, forget it, Wifi itself (not RPi nor Linux) makes it very difficult and requires support from the actual AP (and the RPi). – A.B Oct 12 '22 at 19:20
  • See this Q/A where I made an answer and especially the network engineering link in it, about why it's different from Ethernet, what are those 3 MAC addresses or even 4 MAC addresses in Wifi when Ethernet uses only 2: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/554331/theoretical-tap-interface-w-wifi-parent-interface/555676#555676 . – A.B Oct 12 '22 at 19:26

0 Answers0