pTRTd

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The Portable Transport Relay Translator Daemon (pTRTd) is a method of allowing IPv6 hosts to communicate with IPv4 hosts. It is a TRT as specified by RFC 3142, similar to the Faith package implemented by the KAME project. However, unlike Faith, it doesn't depend on special support in the kernel IPv6 stack, and thus should be fairly easy to port to most Unix-like operating systems.

If you are new to pTRTd, please see the FAQ/Intro page.

News

December 12, 2010: ptrtd officially declared dead

For an extremely deceased project, ptrtd gets a lot of hits. Nobody should be using it. It is highly insecure and known to cause data corruption in translated sessions.

Instead please use TAYGA, which is a stable, production-ready stateless NAT64 that does not suffer from ptrtd's many problems. Like ptrtd, TAYGA runs as an out-of-kernel daemon that uses the TUN interface to exchange packets with the kernel. Additionally TAYGA supports IPv4->IPv6 session initiation, ICMP translation, and full TCP pass-through to allow window scaling, TCP timestamps, etc.

April 14, 2002: totd 1.3 is available

As of mid-March, Feico Dillema released totd 1.3, which includes Linux support. You can download a tarball or RPMS from ftp.pasta.cs.uit.no. Now you can run your own DNS translator and don't have to use dns-proxy.litech.org. I'll leave dns-proxy.litech.org running for the time being, for those who just want to test.

February 12, 2002: ptrtd 0.5.2 released.

Enhancements include:

UDP is now supported.
Neighbor discovery behavior is improved, but a long ways from done.
Additional interface drivers are included to support virtual network methods used by the User Mode Linux project. They are undocumented and rather experimental at this point, so if you want to use them, be prepared to muck with the source code.

January 23, 2002: Website redesign

I've added a new TODO list with a bit of a roadmap on what features will be added when. Work on pTRTd is suspended for a few weeks due to a dead motherboard and moving to follow my girlfriend to her new job.

January 6, 2002: ptrtd 0.5.1 released.

Enhancements include:

Uses Ethernet-based tap device instead of IP tunnel. This is still part of the tuntap package.
Linux 2.2 support! Users running Linux 2.2 will need to install the tuntap module.
New "-i" flag to specify the interface to attach to. This is a required parameter for Linux 2.2, as the older tuntap module can't allocate devices automatically. (Most users can probably just specify "-i tap0")

Download

WARNING: pTRTd is still under development. It is not ready for production use. DO NOT USE IT EXCEPT IN AN ISOLATED IPv6 NETWORK. It is unstable and may contain security holes that would allow an attacker to gain access to the host system.

That said, the code works fairly well in its current state. I've personally been using it to browse the web for months without any problems.

If you'd like to download and test pTRTd, here is the source code:

ptrtd-0.5.2.tar.gz

See the README file, which is available online and in the distribution.

Last modified 2010-12-12 by Nathan Lutchansky.