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ETHERIP(4) Device Drivers Manual ETHERIP(4)

etheripEtherIP tunnel interface

pseudo-device etherip

The etherip interface is a pseudo-device for tunnelling Ethernet frames across IP[46] networks using RFC 3378 EtherIP encapsulation.

An etherip interface can be created using the ifconfig etheripN create command or by setting up a hostname.if(5) configuration file for netstart(8). It must be configured with the addresses used for the outer header. This can be done using ifconfig(8)'s tunnel command (which uses the SIOCSLIFPHYADDR ioctl).


Given two physically separate Ethernet networks, a bridge can be used as follows to make them appear as the same local area network. If bridge1 on network1 has the external IP address on em0, bridge2 on network2 has the external IP address on em0, and both bridges have em1 on their internal network (network1 and network2, respectively), the following configuration can be used to bridge network1 and network2.


# ifconfig bridge0 add etherip0 add em1

Create and configure the etherip0 interface:

(on bridge 1) # ifconfig etherip0 tunnel
(on bridge 2) # ifconfig etherip0 tunnel


esp from to spi 0x4242:0x4243 \
flow esp proto etherip from to


# ipsecctl -f ipsec.conf

Appropriate ipsec.conf(5) for bridge2:

esp from to spi 0x4243:0x4242 \
flow esp proto etherip from to

And load them:

# ipsecctl -f ipsec.conf


ike esp proto etherip from to

And on bridge2:

ike esp proto etherip from to


# ifconfig em1 up
# ifconfig etherip0 up


# ifconfig bridge0 up





The etherip device first appeared in OpenBSD 5.9.

The etherip driver was written by Kazuya Goda <>.

January 12, 2018 OpenBSD-current