Linux BRIDGE-STP-HOWTO

Uwe Böhme

          Johann-Heinrich-Abt-Straße 7
          95213
          Münchberg
          Germany
          +49/9251 960877
          +49/9251 960878
          uwe@bnhof.de

Lennert Buytenhenk

bridge code maintainer and developer
gnu.org

buytenh@gnu.org

Release v0.04

Revision History
Revision v0.04	11 January 2001	Revised by: U.B.
Changed Lennert`s Bridge Homepage URL; added NIC to list.
Revision v0.03	17 July 2000	Revised by: U.B.
Overwork pdf. Download links in doc.
Revision v0.02	16 July 2000	Revised by: U.B.
Fixed broken graphics in html dsl. Prepared pdf. Typos.
Revision v0.01	25 June 2000	Revised by: U.B.
Changes name from BRIDGE-HOWTO to BRIDGE-STP-HOWTO (avoid interference with BRIDGE-HOWTO by Christopher Cole) and kill version 1.xx. Lennert Buytenhenk announced as coauthor.
Revision v0.00	01 June 2000	Revised by: U.B.
Initial Release.

Table of Contents

1. License

2. Document Home and Downloads

2.1. The Bridge Sources And Utilities
2.2. The Mailing-List
2.3. This Document

3. What Is A Bridge?

4. Rules On Bridging

5. Preparing The Bridge

5.1. Get The Files
5.2. Apply The Patches
5.3. Configure The Kernel
5.4. Compile The Kernel
5.5. Compile The Bridge Utilities

6. Set Up The Bridge

6.1. brctl Command Synopsis
6.2. Basic Setup

7. Advanced Bridge Features

7.1. Spanning Tree Protocol
7.2. Bridge And The IP-Chains

8. A Practical Setup Example

8.1. Hardware-setup

8.2. Software-setup

8.3. See It Work

8.4. Bridge Tests

8.4.1. Tear The Patch Wire Test
8.4.2. Kill The Root Bridge Test

A. Network Interface Cards

B. Recommended Reading

C. FAQ

About The Linux Modular Bridge And STP

This document describes how to setup a bridge with the recent kernel patches and brctl utility by Lennert Buytenhek. and tries to explain about the STP implementation in this code.

With developer kernel 2.3.47 the new bridging code is part of the mainstream. There are patches for stable kernels 2.2.14 to 2.2.16, where each is also available as a ipchains-patch.