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FAITH(4)		     Kernel Interfaces Manual			FAITH(4)

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

SYNOPSIS
     pseudo-device faith [count]

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

     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  ad-
     dress/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 traf-
     fic.   The  program can accept some specific IPv6 TCP traffic, perform get-
     sockname(2) to get the IPv6 destination address specified	by  the  client,
     and  perform application-specific address mapping to relay IPv6 TCP to IPv4
     TCP.

     The 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  misuse,
     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, internet draft, draft-ietf-ngtrans-tcpudp-relay-04.txt, work in
     progress material.

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

FreeBSD 4.5			 April 10, 1999 			FAITH(4)

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