Bridge perculiarities

I am writing to seek the opinions from the gurus here. My kernel
is 2.6.22.4. The perculiarities comes in two different configurations :-


Configuration 1
===========
I am using ebtables to broute all traffic :-

      ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -i $INSIDE_DEV -p ipv4 \
         -j redirect --redirect-target DROP
      ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -i $OUTSIDE_DEV -p ipv4 \
        -j redirect --redirect-target DROP

On the left side of the bridge, I have a machine A with 192.168.128.2
and on the right side of the bridge, I have a machine C with 192.168.128.3,
and the bridge B itself is 192.168.128.1.

On the machine B ( bridge itself ) and C I have ssh server running on port 22. 

When the machine A makes a ssh connection to C, it's however logs into
the bridge B instead. It's not limited to ssh port, any processes listening
to any port on bridge B, will hijack the connections to machine C.

What have I done wrong ?


Configuration 2
===========
Instead of brouting all traffic, I will now broute only the http traffic this way :-

      ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -i $INSIDE_DEV -p ipv4 \
        --ip-protocol tcp --ip-destination-port 80 -j redirect --redirect-target DROP
      ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -i $OUTSIDE_DEV -p ipv4 \
        --ip-protocol tcp --ip-source-port 80 -j redirect --redirect-target DROP

which means none port 80 traffic will be bridged instead of broute. 
( This might not be relevent to the observation below ).

At the same time, on the br0 interface, there is a IP configured and 
there is an interface to the internet via NAT.

I have a LAN machine A using that the bridge br0 IP as a default gateway. 

However I noticed that at a very high % of time, the ping packet from
a LAN machine A with the private source IP gets into the internet without 
being nattted. The strange thing is that, it is not consistent. Sometimes 
it's natted, sometimes it's not. It means the SNAT rule in the nat table 
POSTROUTING chain is sometimes skipped.

I am wondering if anyone observed this, or it's due to some of the
patches I applied.

Regards

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