Forwarding

oidentd can forward Ident queries to the host they were intended for, provided that this host is connecting through the machine oidentd is running on.

When forwarding is enabled, the default behavior is to forward immediately and only fall back to using the configured static replies if forwarding fails. This can be changed by using the --masquerade-first (-M) flag, in which case oidentd only forwards requests if no matching static reply was found.

Configuring the Gateway

Forwarding can be enabled on the device performing network address translation by running oidentd with the --forward (-f) option. Optionally, a target port may be specified using --forward=port. If no port is specified, port 113 is used.

Configuring the Servers

All machines that need to receive forwarded queries must be running an Ident server capable of handling these queries, such as oidentd with the --proxy (-P) option. For example, oidentd can be run on a machine behind NAT with the following command:

oidentd -P 10.0.0.1

This allows 10.0.0.1 to forward queries to the current oidentd instance.

If you specified a custom target port for forwarding, make sure the target server is configured to listen on that port:

oidentd -P 10.0.0.1 -p 113

Port 113 is the default and does not need to be specified explicitly.