Hi, The scenario I have is that I have a computer with one network interface eth0, that is receiving it's configuration through DHCP, and uses complex firewalling rules for eth0. Now I want to add a virtual machine on that computer According to the usual recipies, I have to do the following: ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 eth0 dhclient br0 Afterwards I can add interfaces to the bridge: brctl addif br0 tun0 This has several disadvantages: * It causes a network outage for up to a few seconds (mostly due to the unnecessary DHCP) * It does not migrate the firewall rules to br0 * It breaks all firewall-rules that were written for eth0 * If I use eth0 in the office today, wlan0 at home, and ppp0 when I am outside, then I would need lots of different scripts for all the different bridging combinations. Now the idea is to add migration support to Linux Bridging. It could look like this: brctl addbr br0 brctl takeif br0 eth0 take-interface would migrate the IP address, and routing entries from the eth0 interface to the bridge, in a more-or-less atomic fashion, and add eth0 as interface to the brige. It would also adapt iptables-rules that were written for eth0 to be pointing to br0 now. To release the bridge again, it could be done like this: brctl releaseif br0 eth0 brctl delbr br0 Since all that is a bit complex, I still have an alternative proposal: What if we bridge-enable all normal interfaces? It could look like this: brctl enablebr eth0 This would enable bridging mode for the eth0 interface. It automatically is able to use the DHCP ip address it was given, the firewalling, ... I can then easily add additional interfaces to the bridge-enabled interface like this: brctl addif eth0 tun0 And I don't need to worry about DHCP, firewalls, ... anymore. So my question now is: Which way should we go? Migrating interface configuration into bridges, or bridge-enabling interfaces? Best regards, Philipp Gühring _______________________________________________ Bridge mailing list Bridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bridge
