Diffrence bewteen routers and Bridges.

Hi,

I have a lan connected to a bridge.... on my wire i have packets which have 10 diffrent IP address and mac address( say 1 IP address and 1 Mac address in a packet) including a packet with a broadcasr address.
This is intercepted by a bridge how does it behave.... i


similar situation, i have 10 packets diffrent Ip and mac address ( including a broad cast address) intercepted by router.. how does, it behave....

Will router process all the 10 packets ...?

Thanks in advace.

-Manjunath.

A bridge is just going to send any frames it receives out all ports except the one it received it on. A router will examine the IP destination, and forward it based on it's routing table. Also, a router does not forward broadcasts unless a broadcast relay (also known as IP helper) is configured. The IP helper will actually make the broadcast into an unicast.

As jwj says, the bridge won't bother about the IP addresses it sees in the packets; it is only interested in whether or not to forward each Ethernet frame because it is only a layer 2 device. The router, on the other hand, uses the IP address to make its routing decision as it is a layer 3 device