Yes that's right, you have one network in the sense that a broadcast packet to the MAC address of FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF arrives at all devices. This is what is meant by a single Layer 2 network. Layer 2 refers to MAC addressing for the most part (for ethernet and WiFi at least)
Layer 3 refers to IP addressing. An IP address belongs to a computer, a MAC address belongs to a particular Network Interface Card.
To get the Layer 3 network to work, you use a standard OpenWrt router, you set a static IP address on the WAN side, you hand out addresses on the LAN via DHCP like default, the LAN side uses the router as the gateway, if there were an entire internet connected on WAN, the LAN side would be able to get to anywhere on that side...
but now, you can't route multicast from WAN to LAN in this scenario without doing something else... what else requires you to decide exactly what you want, and to install and configure packages that I mentioned above. By default OpenWrt doesn't do multicast routing, only unicast routing, so you need extra packages that are available but not installed by default.
It is capable of multicasting, as this is entirely a function of the software not the hardware. What is needed though is to look at packages like "igmpproxy" or "smcroute" or "quagga" or "PIMD" and figure out which one will do what you want and how to configure them to do it.
i tried igmproxy already and its not available for the router i have. so what would the settings be i need to change to get it to work without bridging ? because there are plenty of settings in default open wrt. it also supports IGMP. Maybe I did something wrong with static routes, opening ports, or firewall traffic rules ? Or allow UDP etc. ?
there is no one answer to that question. there are many things you can do depending on what exactly you want to have working. IGMP is just a protocol for requesting certain multicasts, it is the responsibility of software to respond to those requests. It's like if you're not running a DHCP daemon your clients will not be able to get an address with DHCP. You will have to do some research or be able to describe very specifically what you want to have working. If you want a specific single static set of streams to be sent from one side to the other what you want is probably smcroute, so start there perhaps.
i researched a lot and i was going nuts. i just want to simulate a 10.0.0 network and a 192.168.. network to view a muticast stream. and all seemed to work. but i don't like the bridge solution.
I tried installing igmpproxy: Getting these errors
root@OpenWrt:~# opkg update
Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.1/targets/ar71xx/generic/packages/Packages.gz
*** Failed to download the package list from http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.1/targets/ar71xx/generic/packages/Packages.gz
It also says i should check my internet connection. But I am connected because I can ping google.com
hello,
just wanted to say I solved the problem. I had to disable the WAN6 interface. after that the installation of igmpproxy worked. Strange but it works
Glad you got it working!