Re: Bridge interface and IP address

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:38:51 +0200
    From:        Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20100830103851.GA6359%asim.lip6.fr@localhost>

  | No, you can't assign an IP address to a bridge in NetBSD.
  | Just assign the IP to one of the interfaces member of the bridge,

Is there a good reason it is done this way, or is this just one of those
things that would be better fixed, but no-one has considered important
enough to do anything about (yet at least) ?

I ask because it always seemed backwards to me - the bridge ouught to be
the "higher level" interface, with the underlying hardware being just the
components used to build it - kind of like we build a raidframe "device"
out of real hardware (or anything that looks like real hardware).

The way bridges are configured is kind of equivalent to building a raid5
out of wd0a wd1a and wd2a and then saying "you can't mount a filesystem from
the raid5 device, just mount it one of the underlying hardware devices,
say wd0a, and everything just works"   Fortunately, that is not how raidframe
works, and (IMO) it isn't how bridges should work either.

In particular, with the current scheme, if I'm bridging (say) 3 interfaces,
and I want to remove one, and add a different one, the steps to do that
vary wildly depending upon whether the one I need to remove happens to be
the blessed one that has had the address assigned to it.   That's poor.

kre