Bridge+firewall - possible?

Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com)
Tue, 8 Dec 1998 18:05:50 -0500 (EST)


In designing a firewall for our company, we decided it would be best to
build a bridgable, packet-filtering firewall instead of messing with
routes, subnetting, and gateways on our 200+ client machines.

After I got everything set up, I found out that Linux bridging layer
does not go through the packet filter. That makes sense... it's
ethernet vs IP layers.

My question -- is there any way to set up a packet-filtering bridge
using Linux? (including coding)

To forestall some of the more obvious responses: We wanted bridging
instead of routing because we have a Class C that is pretty much full.
Subnetting our address space and setting up the firewall as a gateway
involves much pain, especially since we only have four hosts outside
the firewall, and over 200 inside. Internally, we have a bunch of 3com
SuperStack switches tossing packets around between the various clients.

Advice and comments are welcome.

Jeff

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