NAME
parprouted - Proxy ARP IP bridging daemon
SYNOPSIS
parprouted [-d] [-p] interface [interface]
DESCRIPTION
parprouted is a daemon for transparent IP (Layer 3) proxy ARP bridging.
Unlike standard bridging, proxy ARP bridging allows to bridge Ethernet
networks behind wireless nodes. Normal L2 bridging does not work
between wireless nodes because wireless does not know about MAC
addresses used in the wired Ethernet networks. Also this daemon is
useful for making transparent firewalls.
The daemon listens for incoming ARP requests, and in case the location
of the requested IP address is unknown, forwards them to other
interfaces, as well as updates kernel ARP table with the received
replies. When necessary, the daemon generates an ARP reply itself,
which causes the stations to send traffic to the host daemon is running
on. By automatically adding appropriate /32 routes to Linux kernel IP
routing table for the hosts learned via ARP, daemon ensures that the
Linux kernel will be able to route the packets to the destination host
when it receives them without any need routing/subnetting manually.
All routes entered by the daemon have a metric of 50.
Unless you use -p switch, all entries in the ARP table will be
refreshed (rechecked by sending ARP requests) every 50 seconds. This
keeps them from being expired by kernel.
Normally it takes about 60 ms for a bridge to update all its tables and
start sending packets to the destination.
REQUIREMENTS
This daemon can be used for unicast traffic only. I.e., DHCP is not
supported. Use software such as dhcrelay to "bridge" DHCP.
You should have an IP address assigned on all of your interfaces that
you do bridging on. There is no need for this address to be from the
same networks as the bridged networks. Any dummy address will do.
The system should have correct default route.
parprouted requires "ip" program from iproute2 tools to be installed in
/sbin. If it is installed in another location, please replace
"/sbin/ip" occurances in the source with the correct path. As well you
should have proc filesystem mounted in /proc because the daemon uses
/proc/net/arp.
parprouted is designed for and tested only with Linux 2.4.x kernels.
OPTIONS
The list of interfaces to do bridging on should be given via the
command line.
The daemon accepts the following switches:
-d, which stands for debugging. If you run it in debugging mode the
daemon will not go to background and will print additional debugging
information to stdout/stderr.
-p, which makes all ARP entries to be permanent. This will also result
in that ARP tables will not be refreshed by ARP pings.
EXAMPLE
To bridge between wlan0 and eth0: parprouted eth0 wlan0
AUTHOR
(C) 2004, Vladimir Ivaschenko <vi@maks.net>
http://www.hazard.maks.net