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On 28/02/10 15:56, Arne Schwabe wrote:
>  On 28.02.2010 14:22, David Sommerseth wrote:
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>> On 26/06/09 17:00, Arne Schwabe wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have written a simple plugin for packet filtering that looks up fw
>>> rules
>>> in the order
>>>
>>> Commonname.pf
>>> IP_Port.pf
>>> IP.pf
>>> default.pf
>>>
>>> If one of this files is found the file is used as PF configuration.
>>> Maybe
>>> this plugin is useful for someone else.
>> Hi!
>>
>> Thank you for your patches.  I've been looking at both patches, and I
>> have some questions in regards to this plug-in.
>>
>> How does this packet filtering further work?  I do not completely
>> understand how you imagine this should work.  I see that it tries to
>> open a number of files with different filename criteria , and if it
>> finds a file it copies it somewhere.
>>
> The packet filtering itself is already part of openvpn. It only works in
> tap mode iirc. See
> http://svn.openvpn.net/projects/openvpn/branches/BETA21/openvpn/pf.c. A
> description of the packet filter format is given in
> http://svn.openvpn.net/projects/openvpn/branches/BETA21/openvpn/management/management-notes.txt
> 
> COMMAND -- client-pf  (OpenVPN 2.1 or higher)
> 
> This plugin/patch only add the possibility to use the packet filter
> functionality without use of the management interface.

Thank you for your pointers.  I've been reading the docs and looking at
the code.  I'm a bit more informed now.  But there are still some magic
here which I don't understand.  How does copying a file enable the
packet filtering itself?  Granted the man page and management-notes.txt
might be a bit too vague here.

man page:
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
       --management-client-pf
                Management interface clients must specify a packet
                filter file for each connecting client.  See
                management-notes.txt in OpenVPN distribution for
                detailed notes.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------


management-notes.txt:
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMAND -- client-pf  (OpenVPN 2.1 or higher)
- ---------------------------------------------

Push a packet filter file to a specific client.

The OpenVPN server should have been started with the
- --management-client-pf directive so that it will require that
VPN tunnel packets sent or received by client instances must
conform to that client's packet filter configuration.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the docs, "packet filter file" is mentioned, but the docs does a poor
job describing all the parts of the feature - which in fact might be
/my/ main problem.  It is not described the purpose of this file, except
what kind of contents you might find in it and how to understand that.
Further, I'm not sure if this should be run on the server or client
side, or if it can be used on both sides.  Is this something the server
can push to the clients?  It's many loose threads here, which confuses
me a little bit.

Arne, you patch seems to play inside the defined playground you have
available, so I'm not criticising your plug-in here now.  But I need to
be able to understand the magic happening here to give your plug-in a
fair review.

Having that said, the whole packet filtering implementation in OpenVPN,
having very good intentions indeed, seems to be rather "hackerish".
Just to save the rules in a temporary file (which it looks like it does,
according to pf.c:497) seems odd and so un-logic. But that's not your
responsibility, Arne :)

But if you can please try to enlighten me further, I would appreciate
that.  After all, you have a plug-in which solves an issue for you - and
I don't want to block your plug-in for inclusion as long as it is
considered useful.


Kind regards,

David Sommerseth
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