cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
311
Views
5
Helpful
1
Replies

Preventing a problem with bridging wired nic and wireless nic

mmedwid
Level 3
Level 3

A number of years back we had an incident where someone (who really, really should have known better) bridged together his wireless connection (on one vlan  and subnet) and his wired nic (on another vlan and subnet).  This caused havoc until we identified the culprit was identified and chastened.  Hadn't thought about this much since then.  But it came up in conversation recently how one from the network side could prevent this kind of disaster. 

Is there any way technically to prevent this kind of issue?  I supposed you could limit mac addresses permitted on the wired side with learning.  Anything else smart folks here can think of?  Thank you.

1 Reply 1

Leo Laohoo
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

There are some laptops that have this feature disabled (by default) in the BiOS.  It's called "LAN Switching".  Recently, I read a post from Stephen (Steve) Rodriguez about this.  MS has put a little bit of smart in the OS.  If the wireless is ON and is plugged into the wired network, the OS will put a higher value to the wireless network and stop traffic traversing the wireless NIC.

Review Cisco Networking for a $25 gift card