Egress Interface pinning

Official client software for OpenVPN Access Server and OpenVPN Cloud.
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smackie
OpenVpn Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:58 am

Egress Interface pinning

Post by smackie » Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:03 am

Folks,

Is there a way to have the OpenVPN Connect client use a particular interface to connect to a server (in this case, OpenVPN Cloud)? I'm experimenting with using OpenVPN Cloud as a backup admin VPN for a few remote sites. For this to work, I need to have the OpenVPN traffic exit the Mac using the directly attached LTE interface, not the default Ethernet.

Any thoughts about how to do this? I could add a static route for the OpenVPN Cloud server prefix but that seems potentially fragile given that it's removing the indirection from the DNS lookup.

Cheers!

Scott....

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openvpn_inc
OpenVPN Inc.
Posts: 1332
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2021 10:41 am

Re: Egress Interface pinning

Post by openvpn_inc » Tue Jun 29, 2021 4:43 pm

Hello smackie,

OpenVPN just follows whatever route your routing table tells it to use. You could probably figure out one of the IP addresses of one of our servers, and then input that into OpenVPN Connect v3 (you can override which server it connects to from within the Connect v3 app), and set up a route in your routing table for that one specific IP to go through a different interface than the default.

That's one way to do what you request. But there's no configuration option that says - use this interface.

edit: I should probably point out that bypassing DNS for this could be bad, as during maintenance we might move some servers out of commission and replace them with others, and if you pin by IP, you might get into trouble later on.

Kind regards,
Johan
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