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Internal Bridging

The SoftPerfect Bandwidth Manager is able to forward traffic between two or more network cards. This feature is useful when the PC running the bandwidth manager acts as a bridge between two networks, or between a network and an ISP connection. Moreover, such box can be plugged into almost any LAN to manage and control its network flow. In other words, it works as a transparent bridge.

To define a bridge, select Tools - Bridging from the main menu and choose the network adapters you want to join.
Note: Only Ethernet adapters are supported.

Once a bridge is defined, the SoftPerfect Bandwidth Manager starts traffic forwarding between adapters in the bridge and you can proceed with rules. It is not recommended to configure rules with the Any Interface scope as that might cause double packet processing and performance degradation.

Since the bridge is transparent, your network addressing scheme does not change. For example, you put the bridge between your network that uses 192.168.0.x addressing and a router that has address 192.168.0.1. Network cards merged into the bridge should be assigned any unused addresses in range 192.168.0.x, so that the bridge itself will be able to communicate. The default gateway for network clients would still be 192.168.0.1 because requests from the clients would come through the bridge transparently to the router and back.