DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages
GIF(4) DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual GIF(4)
NAME
gif - generic tunnel interface
SYNOPSIS
pseudo-device gif
DESCRIPTION
The gif interface is a generic tunnelling pseudo device for IPv4 and
IPv6. It can tunnel IPv[46] traffic over IPv[46]. Therefore, there can
be four possible configurations. The behavior of gif is mainly based on
RFC 2893 IPv6-over-IPv4 configured tunnel. On NetBSD, gif can also
tunnel ISO traffic over IPv[46] using EON encapsulation.
Each gif interface is created at runtime using interface cloning. This
is most easily done with the "ifconfig create" command or using the
gifconfig_<interface> variable in rc.conf(5).
To use gif, the administrator needs to configure the protocol and
addresses used for the outer header. This can be done by using
gifconfig(8), or SIOCSIFPHYADDR ioctl. The administrator also needs to
configure the protocol and addresses for the inner header, with
ifconfig(8). Note that IPv6 link-local addresses (those that start with
fe80::) will be automatically configured whenever possible. You may need
to remove IPv6 link-local addresses manually using ifconfig(8), if you
want to disable the use of IPv6 as the inner header (for example, if you
need a pure IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel). Finally, you must modify the routing
table to route the packets through the gif interface.
The gif pseudo-device can be configured to be ECN friendly. This can be
configured by IFF_LINK1.
ECN friendly behavior
The gif pseudo-device can be configured to be ECN friendly, as described
in draft-ietf-ipsec-ecn-02.txt. This is turned off by default, and can
be turned on by the IFF_LINK1 interface flag.
Without IFF_LINK1, gif will show normal behavior, as described in RFC
2893. This can be summarized as follows:
Ingress Set outer TOS bit to 0.
Egress Drop outer TOS bit.
With IFF_LINK1, gif will copy ECN bits (0x02 and 0x01 on IPv4 TOS byte or
IPv6 traffic class byte) on egress and ingress, as follows:
Ingress Copy TOS bits except for ECN CE (masked with 0xfe) from
inner to outer. Set ECN CE bit to 0.
Egress Use inner TOS bits with some change. If outer ECN CE bit
is 1, enable ECN CE bit on the inner.
Note that the ECN friendly behavior violates RFC 2893. This should be
used in mutual agreement with the peer.
Security
A malicious party may try to circumvent security filters by using
tunnelled packets. For better protection, gif performs both martian and
ingress filtering against the outer source address on egress. Note that
martian/ingress filters are in no way complete. You may want to secure
your node by using packet filters. Ingress filtering can be turned off
by IFF_LINK2 bit.
Miscellaneous
By default, gif tunnels may not be nested. This behavior may be modified
at runtime by setting the sysctl(8) variable net.link.gif.max_nesting to
the desired level of nesting. Additionally, gif tunnels are restricted
to one per pair of end points. Parallel tunnels may be enabled by
setting the sysctl(8) variable net.link.gif.parallel_tunnels to 1.
SEE ALSO
inet(4), inet6(4), gifconfig(8)
R. Gilligan and E. Nordmark, "Transition Mechanisms for IPv6 Hosts and
Routers", RFC 2893, ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2893.txt, August 2000.
Sally Floyd, David L. Black, and K. K. Ramakrishnan, IPsec Interactions
with ECN, December 1999, draft-ietf-ipsec-ecn-02.txt.
HISTORY
The gif device first appeared in the WIDE hydrangea IPv6 kit.
BUGS
There are many tunnelling protocol specifications, all defined
differently from each other. The gif pseudo-device may not interoperate
with peers which are based on different specifications, and are picky
about outer header fields. For example, you cannot usually use gif to
talk with IPsec devices that use IPsec tunnel mode.
The current code does not check if the ingress address (outer source
address) configured in the gif interface makes sense. Make sure to
specify an address which belongs to your node. Otherwise, your node will
not be able to receive packets from the peer, and it will generate
packets with a spoofed source address.
If the outer protocol is IPv4, gif does not try to perform path MTU
discovery for the encapsulated packet (DF bit is set to 0).
If the outer protocol is IPv6, path MTU discovery for encapsulated
packets may affect communication over the interface. The first bigger-
than-pmtu packet may be lost. To avoid the problem, you may want to set
the interface MTU for gif to 1240 or smaller, when the outer header is
IPv6 and the inner header is IPv4.
The gif pseudo-device does not translate ICMP messages for the outer
header into the inner header.
In the past, gif had a multi-destination behavior, configurable via
IFF_LINK0 flag. The behavior is obsolete and is no longer supported.
It is thought that this is not actually a bug in gif, but rather lies
somewhere around a manipulation of an IPv6 routing table.
DragonFly 6.5-DEVELOPMENT April 10, 1999 DragonFly 6.5-DEVELOPMENT