# Unable to get bridge working on EdgeRouter Lite



## FzZzT (Aug 5, 2016)

I followed this article to get my EdgeRouter lite (ERL) up and running, and it works, but I haven't been able to get bridging to work. I *was* able to get bridging to work recently on a fitlet, and it was pretty easy, so I am wondering if the reason I haven't been able to on the ERL is due to MIPS or 11-BETA3...

What I am looking for is to set all three interfaces as a bridge and make the ERL a passive network firewall (no NAT), with an internal DHCP IP for SSH access (on any port). It will sit in between my DSL modem and my desktop.

Currently, I have pf disabled, one cloned interface (bridge0) that includes all three interfaces in rc.conf. I also have octe0 set as "DHCP" and the other two set as "up" in rc.conf. The bridge seems to get created correctly, with all three member interfaces, and the IP gets bound on octe0 and I can even ping out. However, it looks like traffic on another port (from my desktop) doesn't cross interfaces and doesn't make it past the ERL. I don't see the octe0 light blink when the octe1 light blinks, and I can't ping the gateway from my desktop.

When it boots up now, after enabling bridge0, it loads 2 kernel modules, one for bridge and one for bridgestp (something like that). I read somewhere that MIPS doesn't support kernel modules, so this surprised me, but maybe that was old information?

I'm not sure what else to look at, at this point. There is no pf running or loaded or enabled. Do I need to set a sysctl to get it to pass traffic from one interface to another on the bridge or something?


----------



## SirDice (Aug 5, 2016)

Please note that MIPS is a Tier 3 platform. Those are experimental and there's no guarantee anything actually works.


----------



## Oko (Aug 5, 2016)

OpenBSD works relatively well on EdgeRouter lite (Octanium port unlike FreeBSD is created with completely non-proprietary open source tools, FreeBSD port is created with donated proprietary tools). When I say relatively well I meant that storage driver was week in the past. Besides that what you are going to find out is that unless you can use hardware crypto which OpenBSD can't use since it is not bootstrapped with proprietary tools performance is not worth the money. EdgeRouter goes for about $100. It could be cheaper now. I have Atom based firewalls which use comparable amount of electricity and which cost $135. Atom outperforms MIPS (EdgeRouter) significantly (over 10 times better) in particularly if you going to set up some kind IPSec gateway or Unified Threat Management.


----------



## FzZzT (Aug 5, 2016)

This is just for my home so it's not a big deal if something doesn't work, and it won't be under high load, but the basics would be necessary... I'm not going to do any crypto. I like the ERL's form factor, which is why I tried it. I returned the fitlet because it ran too hot for its cost ($250) and power (8W average @1.6 GHz) and the cpu freq didn't work. It was a great size, though. If I could find an x86 (Atom is fine) for roughly the same form factor, that runs cool and with low power, that would be great...


----------

