Ok, I've looked up loads of stuff on the interwebbery, and all the solutions to make a pi into a wifi *bridge* are actually making it into a router, with its own DHCP etc
Not the same as the average wifi access works in a WAP at all.
Can this actually be done at all?
I basically want a pi on the network to be connected to by wifi clients, and forward the packets over its ethernet to the main LAN. And let the main DHCP server do the business.
You set it up as an AP and enable ip4 forwarding so so stuff received on the wifi goes to the ethernet and back. I've got this on an old Pi but it's not handy or I'd look at the config.
So it is possible? I found something called bridge-utils that implies it can be done, but the Pi is now bricked since I did an upgrade on it.
Not done it on a Pi, but used to use bridges with Xen virtual networking, follow steps 1..5 but substitute wl0 (or whatever) for eth1
That's routing not bridging. With bridging you create a bridge device and attach two network devices to it - packets received on one device are sent to another. It's as if the wifi and LAN are one network. Most consumer routers bridge their wifi and LAN ports.
If you want to go ethernet->wifi->ethernet there are some issues with the Pi
0W/3 hardware not having the right features in the wifi chip:(I previously had a better source than that, which I can't find now)
If bridging doesn't work then you can still route, ie put wifi and LAN on different subnets and have forwarding rules to pass packets between. Which is probably why most of the guides out there are discussing that not bridging.
You can also use proxy ARP to make IPv4 routing look like bridging:
I've done Proxy ARP on other machines long ago but not a Pi.
Theo
Mea culpa. You're right that's routed mode. My memory gets hazy about this as I think I tried bridging but it wouldn't (or I couldn't) make it work. This was with a PiB+ and Ralink RT2870/RT3070 USB dongle. So I went with a routed solution. But it was a long time ago. Sorry for raising false hopes.
Try this in the standard docs:
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