Bridging and 'pseudo-device tap' and PPPoE

[Naga R Narayanaswamy]

Hello:   I want to create pseudo ethernet devices to simulate many NICs on a PC. In Solaris, we can do "ifconfig hme0:1 10.1.1.1 up" hme0:2 etc to create logival interfaces. I am trying to do a similar thing on FreeBSD. But after searching the archives, I find that I have to use tap device. Is there any other way than the approach I am using below.   I reconfigured the kernel and I have configured the tap device.  ifconfig tap0 shows a MAC address and UP status. I assigned a IP address also. I want to make fxp0 and tap0 in one bridge group. I tried both approaches, using "option BRIDGE" and ng_bridge example in /usr/share/examples. Is bridging supposed to work with tap devices?   I do not see the bridging  happen between tap0 and fxp0. I can see the packet written on tap device when I do a  "hexdump /dev/tap0", but not on fxp0 (using ethereal). (I am doing a ping out of tap interface). And when I have bridging turned on using ng_bridge, if I initiate a PPPoE session, I get socket already connected warning, but I do not see the PADI packet on the fxp0 interface at all.   The goal is that I want to use tap0 device in ppp.conf and initiate a ppp -ddial <service> The goal is to have 100 tap devices and initiate pppoe sessions over each of the tap sessions to simulate a 100 NIC cards with different mac addresses.   Thanks Naga