If you remember I had constricted a bridge from wifi to ethernet to act as a bridged access point. On a PI 4B as a test platform
The problem was that whilst the bridge was reasonably OK accessing my LAN, up to 90% packet loss was experienced when accessing the internet via my edge router.
Two further points have been established but the exact reason for the behaviour still remains a mystery
1/. A friend with a Pi 5 attempted to duplicate the setup, could not get it to work and instead used the Network Manager GUI to set up a (routed?) access point which worked ok. It turns out that you cannot use the GUI tool to set up a bridge at all. Only nmcli.
2/. After a long time with traceroutes and pings I realised that this particular machine was the *only one wired directly to the router via a single gigabit Ethernet cable*. Everything else went via an ancient
100Mbps switch that I inherited from an office clearout. In a rash of 'well I tried everything else' I unplugged the Pi from the Gigabit router socket and put it into the 100Mbps switch and bingo!... Pretty decent internet performance. Yes extremely long transfers sometimes fail, but its very useable
What I cannot for the life of me understand is *why* this worked. The same [Gigabit] link was involved in both local and Internet access. The only difference being that local access ALSO went through a 100Mbps switch.
If anyone can shed light on this I would appreciate it.
If it matters, the router is a Draytek Vigor2762Vac running PPPoE via an Openrach ONT to an optical fibre for Internet and thence to the ISP.