Forwarding a TCP connection request

Is this possible to do:
a TCP connection request to a specific port on this machine comes in. Can this request
be forwarded to another machine to handle it directly with the client (ie. accepting the session and so on), but without this machine doing NAT for them (except forwarding the initial SYN packet)?

You can get a similar effect using the "redirect" feature of xinetd. The intermediate machine still has to relay the packets to and fro but it's transparent as long as the server doesn't do a getpeername() call.

You can stick an "only_from" parameter in as well to restrict who can connect to the port.

Jon