ARP on bridge ?

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hello,

I have configured a bridge with 3 ports. In the arp table I saw, that the clients, which were connected to the port, were only listed in the bridge. MAC xx is in bridge “bridge1” instead of MAC xx is in the port y of the bridge1. This bridge is part of a hotspot with some hundreds clients.
So I asked me, does the MT make every time an Arp request, to find the client port or does he knew, where to find it? Or does i have configured the bridge wrong?

Thank you very much!

Olli

2

The behaviour you see is correct. IP is layer 3 and ARP handles the layer 3 to layer 2 mappings, whereas the bridge is purely layer 2 and ‘which MAC is on which port’ is stored in the bridge hosts table.