I?m not sure what i?m doing wrong or whether my expectations of netfilter are correct or not. But i basically had the NAT extension forward all incoming tcp traffic to a local socket. I tested it and it worked fine. However I still need the original destination IP and port number for my code to function properly. I get the original destination IP correctly but the port number is never what I expect. Below are the setup steps, my code and tracing that I did: Setup: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 -j ACCEPT iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -j REDIRECT --to-port 9000 Code: cli_fd = accept(fd, (struct sockaddr *) &cli_addr, &cli_len); dst_len = sizeof(dst_addr); if(getsockopt(cli_fd, IPPROTO_IP, SO_ORIGINAL_DST, &dst_addr, &dst_len) != 0) printf("getsockopt() returned error"); else printf("original destination address: %s:%d\n", inet_ntoa(dst_addr.sin_addr), dst_addr.sin_port); The above server is listening on port 9000 on ANY address. When hit by a call from a telnet client (telnet 10.10.10.1 33000) it prints the following: original destination address: 10.10.10.1:59520 I have tried changing the port in the telnet command but everytime I do that a completely different value is reported out. While the listening socket was running and the telnet client was communicating, I ran ?tcpdump? and below are a few lines from that which confirm the ports I expected. There are no traces of port number 59520! (note that 192.168.1.100 is the telnet machine and 192.168.1.101 is the ?intercepting? machine running netfilter: Trace: 13:45:01.688156 IP 192.168.1.100.51961 > 10.10.10.1.33000: P 1:2(1) ack 1 win 256 13:45:01.688256 IP 10.10.10.1.33000 > 192.168.1.100.51961: . ack 2 win 183 13:45:01.688418 IP 10.10.10.1.33000 > 192.168.1.100.51961: P 1:19(18) ack 2 win 183 13:45:01.688585 IP 10.10.10.1.33000 > 192.168.1.100.51961: F 19:19(0) ack 2 win 183 13:45:01.688750 IP 192.168.1.100.51961 > 10.10.10.1.33000: . ack 20 win 256 13:45:01.693081 IP 192.168.1.100.51961 > 10.10.10.1.33000: F 2:2(0) ack 20 win 256 13:45:01.693130 IP 10.10.10.1.33000 > 192.168.1.100.51961: . ack 3 win 183 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html