Iptables/fw3 marks

[Paul D]

As far as I know, nothing is tracked. It seems until now the path is just beaten into the grass, but if we want something more 'concrete' but not inflexible, packages would do well to maintain a list of FWmarks in the wiki. Anything more than a file in the repo would be too inflexible (changes take too long to get noticed->updated).

Many of the packages I have interacted with can customise the mark anyway.

Multi-bit string? It's just a single number in a long spectrum of possibles. 'owning' a bit reduces the bandwidth available (65K -> 16).


On 2024-12-01 00:52, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to use a mark to annotate that a packet has gone through REDIRECT.
> 
> Looking at mwan3 I see that it uses 0xfc00 for its marking.
> 
> I have a couple of questions:
> 
> (1) Why does this require 6 bits out of a 16-bit field?  Why isn't a single bit adequate?
> 
> (2) How does a package "reserve" a bit for marking such that the same bit doesn't get re-used by another package and create conflict/ambiguity?  i.e. who manages the assignment of masks and in what file is this recorded?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Philip
> 
>