feature request: increase max bridges beyond 4

[Dan Brown]

Hello-

I would like to create more than 4 bridges, which is the current limit in the GUI /basic-network.asp page. For example, I would like to have more than 4 SSIDs to make it easy for non-technical users to connect to SSIDs that are associated with always-on VPN connections. I already use 4 bridges and VLANs (regular, guest, internet-of-things, cameras), so this limit of 4 is holding me back. It appears that the GUI already supports more than 4 VLANs.

According to this discussion, the limit of 4 bridges is mostly in the GUI code and only in a few places in the underlying operational code: http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-453903/number-of-vlan-bridges and it is possible to use scripts to set up additional bridges using command line methods.

Thanks for your consideration, and thanks for making Fresh Tomato!

Dan

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[Dan Brown]

Update: There is a commit that implements this enhancement in the mips version of freshtomato here. It is a work in progress, any help finding and fixing bugs would be appreciated.

https://bitbucket.org/pedro311/freshtomato-mips/issues/24/feature-request-increase-max-bridges

[Matthew Wilson]

Absolutely agree. This has been a massive annoyance of mine with Tomato for a very long time.

I understand the rationale for the original implementation of the limit given some of the architectures at the time, but I mean, on my R7000 it’s running 2x1GHz CPU’s which sit mostly idle the majority of the time.

Seeing this increased in production code would be fantastic.

[Vladislav Staroselskiy]

+1 to the request. Even though there are some workarounds using brctl in the scripts, GUI should be able to support them.

At the same time I suggest to review the interface and its fields, as bridge shouldn’t necessarily require an IP address (except for routing or management purposes). For instance, this is my setup, where all the bridges (except br1) don’t need those dummy IPs at all. They are Layer2 VLANs, used to deliver wireless traffic to my main switch via trunk. If I try to remove bridges from here - they would disappear, if I try to keep IP Address/Netmask fields blank - they would report “Invalid IP”, so I stuck with them.

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[rs232]

I am not against this feature but as mentioned in the links above there’s an nvram implication to be quantified.

Perhaps a good feature for high end models with :

• 128KB or more of NVRAM capacity
• 64KB but VPN build only?

If not, I’m afraid we’re going to drive this towards the existing MIPS build range with e.g. AIO with no mysql&captive-portal, etc. This latter perhaps should be avoided as it cause more issues that it fixes (as in too many exceptions).

my 2 c

[pedro]

It will not be supported.