This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

IPL(4)                                                                                                IPL(4)



NAME
       ipl - IP packet log device

DESCRIPTION
       The  ipl  pseudo  device's  purpose is to provide an easy way to gather packet headers of packets you
       wish to log.  If a packet header is to be logged, the entire  header  is  logged  (including  any  IP
       options - TCP/UDP options are not included when it calculates header size) or not at all.  The packet
       contents is also logged after the header.


       Prepending every packet header logged is a structure containing information relevant  to  the  packet
       following and why it was logged.  The structure's format is as follows:

       struct ipl_ci   {
               u_long  sec;      /* time when the packet was logged */
               u_long  usec;
               u_long  plen;     /* length of packet data logged */
               u_short hlen;     /* length of headers logged */
               u_short rule;     /* rule number (for log ...) or 0 if result = log */
               u_long  flags:24; /* XXX FIXME do we care about the extra bytes? */
       #if (defined(OpenBSD) && (OpenBSD <= 1991011) && (OpenBSD >= 199606))
               u_long  filler:8; /* XXX FIXME do we care? */
               u_char  ifname[IFNAMSIZ];
       #else
               u_long  unit:8;
               u_char  ifname[4];
       #endif
       };

       In the case of the header causing the buffer to finish on a non-32bit
       boundary, padding will be `appended' to ensure that the next log entry
       is aligned to a 32bit boundary.


       If the packet contents is more then 128 bytes, then only 128 bytes of the
       packet contents is logged. Should the packet contents finish on a non-32bit
       boundary, then the last few bytes are not logged to ensure the log entry
       is aligned to a 32bit boundary.

       ipl is a read-only (sequential) character pseudo-device.

       The ioctls which are loaded with this device can be found under ipf(4).
       The only ioctl which is used for logging and doesn't affect the filter is:

               ioctl(fd, SIOCIPFFB, int *)

       This ioctl flushes the log buffer and returns the number of bytes flushed.

       There  is  currently  no  support  for  non-blocking IO with this device, meaning all read operations
       should be considered blocking in nature (if there is no data to read, it will  sleep  until  some  is
       made available).

SEE ALSO
       ipf(4)

BUGS
       Packet headers are dropped when the internal buffer (static size) fills.

FILES
       /dev/ipl0



                                                                                                      IPL(4)