LinuxPlanet: New HOWTO: Bridging Mini-HOWTO

From the author’s description of this mini-HOWTO: “This document
describes how to setup an ethernet bridge. What is an ethernet
bridge? An ethernet bridge is a device that controls data packets
within a subnet in an attempt to cut down the amount of traffic. A
bridge is usually placed between two separate groups of computers
that talk within themselves, but not so much with the computers in
the other group. A good example of this is to consider a cluster of
Macintoshes and a cluster of unix machines. Both of these groups of
machines tend to be quite chatty amongst themselves, and the
traffic they produce on the network causes collisions for the other
machines who are trying to speak to one another. A bridge would be
placed between these groups of computers. The job of the bridge is
then to examine the destination of the data packets one at a time
and decide whether or not to pass the packets to the other side of
the ethernet segment. The result is a faster, quieter network with
fewer collisions.”

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