Setting up a bridge disables IP networking?



I have a Linux box with an ethernet adaptor (eth0) that connects into
the local (TCP/IP) LAN. This works.

If I do "brctl addbr br0; brctl addif br0 eth0; ifconfig br0 up", that
IP connection goes dead immediately. No IP packets can be received or
transmitted on eth0, neither pings nor TCP nor anything else. However,
I can still transmit and receive other ethernet frames on eth0 without
problems. I used Scapy and Wireshark to confirm that I can send ARP
frames via eth0 to another host in the LAN, that host receives the
frame and sends back a reply frame, which is received on eth0 on the
bridge host again. No problems there.

How is that even possible? The bridge code should know nothing about
ARP or IP, so how can it make a difference whether I send ARP or IP
over the ethernet interface?

(everything in /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-* is set to 0, so no
netfiltering should be done)

(as soon as I "brctl delif br0 eth0", the IP connection starts working
again)
.



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