Network Card Bridging

So you have Windows XP or Vista and you wish to bridge two or more physical or virtual network cards together? Well you can.

The reason for bridging, which just means sharing the network cards together in to one network, can be useful for various reasons. One major use is with virtual machines, if you already made the Microsoft Loopback Adapter or Tap-32 adapter and want the virtual one to access a real network, bridging can be great.

To bridge two or more network cards together in XP, all you need to go is go to your Control Panel, then Network Connections, select two network cards (hold down Ctrl as you click both cards to selet both at the same time), then right click either one of them, and choose Bridge Connections. That's all you need to do.

Now for Vista it's a little bit of more steps, you have to go to Control Panel, Network and Sharing Center, then Manage Network Connections, then do the same steps, but it works the same.

Now being that it's now a bridge, each card no longer has it's own individual IP address, but one now just for the bridge. So if it's two cards or twenty, it's one IP.

You will still be able to browse the LAN/WAN(Internet normally) with no problems on your machine, yet your virtual machines will now have access to the LAN/WAN. This is if you are actually bridging for virtualization purposes.