On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 06:11:09AM +0200, Claudio Jeker wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 08:05:31PM -0700, Matt S wrote:
> > I apologize in advance if this subject has been addressed but I was unable
> > to turn up anything from a Google search and the manual pages did not quite
> > yield enough information.  IPv6 needs aside, what is the primary difference
> > between tun(4) and gif(4)?  When is it preferrable to use gif(4) over
> > tun(4)?  Is there any reason why I could not, say, perform IPSEC encryption
> > over a tun(4) tunnel?
> > 
> 
> Huh? From the man pages:
>      The tun driver provides a network interface pseudo-device.  Packets sent
>      to this interface can be read by a userland process and processed as
>      desired.  Packets written by the userland process are injected back into
>      the kernel networking subsystem.
> 
>      The gif interface is a generic tunnelling pseudo-device for IPv4 and
>      IPv6.  It can tunnel IPv[46] over IPv[46] with behavior mainly based on
>      RFC 1933 IPv6-over-IPv4, for a total of four possible combinations...
> 
> So tun(4) is a way to get packets to userland while gif is a real tunnel
> device encapsulating the packets and sending it to a remote tunnel
> endpoint. The two things are totaly different and yes you could make IPsec
> in userland over tun(4) but nobody is enough of a masochist to do that.

Don't make bets against the ability of a large enough gene pool to
produce such a twisted individual. :-). And the Orc pits that produce
standards committee members probably produce a few interesting
mutations too.

.... Ken

> 
> -- 
> :wq Claudio

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