I'm having a hard time figuring this problem out - I am trying to write a program that will interact with the Linux tunnel driver. At a very basic level, I simply want to create an application that is able to transfer data over a network tunnel. However, I am completely at a loss as to how to properly set up the tunnel driver in order to accomplish this.
I am developing on Ubuntu 9.04, and I have the tunnel driver kernel module loaded.
There exists the device /dev/net/tun, however there are no /dev/tunX devices. I am unable to create these devices using ifconfig - whenever I run /sbin/ifconfig tun0 up, for example, I get the following error:
tun0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device.
If I attempt to look at the /dev/net/tun device, the following error is presented:
cat: /dev/net/tun: File descriptor in bad state.
Attempting to open /dev/tunX via a small program, basically, a simple
tun_fd = open( "/dev/tun0", O_RDWR )
returns -1: the application is running as root and still cannot open this tunnel device. It is possible to open /dev/net/tun, however this does not appear to generate a new /dev/tunX device to use instead.
So, in summary - how does one go about writing an application that wishes to use the Linux tunnel driver? Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks; ~Robert
Read /usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt.
You are supposed to open the /dev/net/tun device. A subsequent ioctl on the open fd will create the tun0 (or whatever you wish to name it) network interface. Linux's network interfaces do not correspond to any /dev/* device.
There are no /dev/tunX device files. Instead, you open the /dev/net/tun and configure it via ioctl() to "point" to tun0. To show the basic procedure, I will create the TUN interface using the command line tool ip tun tap and then show the C code to read from that TUN device. So to create the tun interface via commands line:
sudo ip tuntap add mode tun dev tun0
ip addr add 10.0.0.0/24 dev tun0 # give it an ip
ip link set dev tun0 up # bring the if up
ip route get 10.0.0.2 # check that packets to 10.0.0.x are going through tun0
ping 10.0.0.2 # leave this running in another shell to be able to see the effect of the next example
Now we have tun0 created. To read / write packets to this interface from an user space program you need to interact with the /dev/net/tun device file using ioctl(). Here is an example that will read the packets arriving at the tun0 interface and print the size:
#include <fcntl.h> /* O_RDWR */
#include <string.h> /* memset(), memcpy() */
#include <stdio.h> /* perror(), printf(), fprintf() */
#include <stdlib.h> /* exit(), malloc(), free() */
#include <sys/ioctl.h> /* ioctl() */
/* includes for struct ifreq, etc */
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <linux/if.h>
#include <linux/if_tun.h>
int tun_open(char *devname)
{
struct ifreq ifr;
int fd, err;
if ( (fd = open("/dev/net/tun", O_RDWR)) == -1 ) {
perror("open /dev/net/tun");exit(1);
}
memset(&ifr, 0, sizeof(ifr));
ifr.ifr_flags = IFF_TUN;
strncpy(ifr.ifr_name, devname, IFNAMSIZ); // devname = "tun0" or "tun1", etc
/* ioctl will use ifr.if_name as the name of TUN
* interface to open: "tun0", etc. */
if ( (err = ioctl(fd, TUNSETIFF, (void *) &ifr)) == -1 ) {
perror("ioctl TUNSETIFF");close(fd);exit(1);
}
/* After the ioctl call the fd is "connected" to tun device specified
* by devname ("tun0", "tun1", etc)*/
return fd;
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int fd, nbytes;
char buf[1600];
fd = tun_open("tun0"); /* devname = ifr.if_name = "tun0" */
printf("Device tun0 opened\n");
while(1) {
nbytes = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
printf("Read %d bytes from tun0\n", nbytes);
}
return 0;
}
I came across a nice intro tutorial about this
http://backreference.org/2010/03/26/tuntap-interface-tutorial/
It comes with a source tarball.
It was in the same set of Google results as this question. :-)