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Lets say, a uni-cast packet is sent from one system to another system. The packet passes goes to the bridge. But the bridge does not have any information about the MAC address of the destination. What will the bridge do in this case?

  1. Drop the packet?
  2. Flood the network with the packet received?

I understand that if the same happens with a switch, then the switch will flood the network with the packet

Sridhar Gopinath
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1 Answers1

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The bridge will do the same thing as a Layer 2 switch - broadcast the packet to all interfaces except the interface where it came from.

The bridge will inspect the source MAC of any Ethernet traffic it receives and use that to build the forwarding database, which you can see with brctl showmacs <bridgename>

Once an address is in the forwarding database, traffic with that destination MAC is sent only to that bridgeport. Just like a Layer 2 switch.

suprjami
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