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FAITH(4)                NetBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual               FAITH(4)


NAME

     faith -- IPv6-to-IPv4 TCP relay capturing interface


SYNOPSIS

     pseudo-device faith


DESCRIPTION

     The faith interface captures IPv6 TCP traffic, for implementing userland
     IPv6-to-IPv4 TCP relay like faithd(8).

     faith interfaces are dynamically created and destroyed with the
     ifconfig(8) create and destroy subcommands.

     Special action will be taken when IPv6 TCP traffic is seen on a router,
     and routing table suggests to route it to faith interface.  In this case,
     the packet will be accepted by the router, regardless of list of IPv6
     interface addresses assigned to the router.  The packet will be captured
     by an IPv6 TCP socket, if it has IN6P_FAITH flag turned on and it has
     matching address/port pairs.  In result, faith will let you capture IPv6
     TCP traffic to some specific destination addresses.  Userland programs,
     such as faithd(8) can use this behavior to relay IPv6 TCP traffic to IPv4
     TCP traffic.  The program can accept some specific IPv6 TCP traffic, per-
     form getsockname(2) to get the IPv6 destination address specified by the
     client, and perform application-specific address mapping to relay IPv6
     TCP to IPv4 TCP.

     IN6P_FAITH flag on IPv6 TCP socket can be set by using setsockopt(2),
     with level equals to IPPROTO_IPV6 and optname equals to IPv6_FAITH.

     To handle error reports by ICMPv6, some of ICMPv6 packets routed to faith
     interface will be delivered to IPv6 TCP, as well.

     To understand how faith can be used, take a look at source code of
     faithd(8).

     As faith interface implements potentially dangerous operation, great care
     must be taken when configuring faith interface.  To avoid possible mis-
     use, sysctl(8) variable net.inet6.ip6.keepfaith must be set to 1 prior to
     the use of the interface.  When net.inet6.ip6.keepfaith is 0, no packet
     will be captured by faith interface.

     faith interface is intended to be used on routers, not on hosts.


SEE ALSO

     inet(4), inet6(4), faithd(8)

     Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino and Kazu Yamamoto, "An IPv6-to-IPv4 transport
     relay translator", RFC 3142, June 2001, ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-
     notes/rfc3142.txt.


HISTORY

     The FAITH IPv6-to-IPv4 TCP relay translator was first appeared in WIDE
     hydrangea IPv6 stack.

NetBSD 4.0                      April 10, 1999                      NetBSD 4.0