Wireless-to-Cat5 bridge?

[cleverhandle]

OK, there are lots of ridiculous details here - I work in one of nation's largest public school systems if that suggests anything. I won't bore y'all with them. My question... can I set up a Linux box to transparently bridge a wireless AP (the Net and the rest of the building) to a Cat5 switch (small LAN)? I've set up bridges as transparent firewalls, so I figured that the box could just pass packets from the wireless interface to the wired interface. While I've set up wireless Linux on this network before, I don't really know enough details about wireless to say whether bridging should be a problem. I would prefer not to route packets or run DHCP - I'm looking for transparent connection if possible.

 

[Soybomb]

Sure, but I'd just drop the cash on a cheap dedicated hardware solution like the linksys wet11. Less upkeep and less to trouble shoot.

 

[cleverhandle]

So would I. But I don't have purchasing power. Even I could convince someone to buy it, it would, literally, be 2004 before we got it. I want to have the machines set up before the kids get back in September. I figure that, barring unforeseen complications specific to wireless bridging, I could set up Debian or Slackware as a bridge in under two hours. And no, I'm not getting paid for it, so don't bother comparing those hours to the price of the hardware bridge.

 

[Soybomb]

Heh understandable, I'll let a linux person throw in some linux links, but for freebsd these two docs outline the steps pretty thoroughly, including using some filtering functions to help out with security.

http://www.gr.daemonnews.org/200211/ipfilter-bridge.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/filtering-bridges/