[BkueKanoodle]

Heres an interesting problem I had with the Linksys wet54gs that I just solved today. I have two of these units forming a wireless bridge between 2 locations. The main router for internet traffic is at 192.168.0.201.

From the remote location I have 5 pc's and 2 macs. The 5 pc's can surf the web fine, as well as access network recources on the other side of the bridge. Any mac on the remote side, can only access netwrok resources, but no internet. I can ping the router on the other side with the mac fine, but I can't ping anything on the net or use safari. Both macs have static ip address's and have the main router set as the default gateway.

In our test lab I set up a windows XP box with bridged connections (one ethernet, one using a wireless card) Again, all pc's on the remote side work fine but the mac's don't.

I finally figured out that the both the pc bridge and the linksys bridge needed to have the Main router gateway assigned , and then presto! both Mac's worked fine.

However this goes against everything I ever learned (and taught) about bridges, as they should care less about what kind of Ip traffic is moving across them. Since the mac's have the main internet router statically assigned, and they can ping it fine, why would one need to set the Gateway on the bridge as well? Furthermore, why does this only affect the macs? Something screwy with the TCP/IP stack in OS X?

I don't think it's the bridges as one is a linux embedded system, the other is a Windows XP box, and all the pc clients work fine?

Anyone have any ideas?

[ghporter]

I think it's more a minor complication than anything else. If you need to pass on (or manually set) gateway information in these two bridges, then they aren't automatically getting it from wherever. Since you're setting their IPs manually, obviously they aren't getting the data from a DHCP server. Further, your Macs need gateway addresses, and since they have static IPs, they're not getting them automatically either. Those bridge implementations must need some way of differentiating between traffic for the bridge and traffic for themselves.

I would also shy away from using a Linksys box and Microsoft's implementation of bridging as a standard to use as a basis for suggesting that OS X has a bug. It's more likely that neither Linksys nor Microsoft bothered to make their bridges as compliant as they could have.