Feature request: Outbound interface selection

[pituluk]

Let us choose outbound interface like simple utilities ping and wget do. openvpn server keeps using default route for its outbound connections which is very annoying

[cron2]

OpenVPN follows the system routing table. If you want something else, set up routing / route policy the way you need it.

My wget man page does not document a way to choose an outbound interface. ping has a -I iface switch, but that will also not actually "choose an interface", it just sets the source IP - whether or not that packet will then be sent out that interface depends on system routing (again) (except for IPv6 link-locals).

Binding to a particular source IP can be done in OpenVPN with local <address>, and if routing is setup accordingly, can be used to select a non-default gateway.

Or just install a host route towards the VPN gateway where you connect, pointing to whatever you need to be used.

[pituluk]

I tried many times, even asked multiple people for help and still didnt figure out how to make openvpn connect to internet through different than default route.

[cron2]

This very much depends on the operating system you use, and what you specifically want to achieve.

What works everywhere is "add a route" - so, you find the IP address of the VPN server you want to connect to (host, nslookup, or by looking in the OpenVPN log) and then you add a host route for that, pointing to the "non-default router" that you want to use. On Linux, this would look like this:

$ host my.openvpn.gateway
my.openvpn.gateway has address 100.64.2.3
$ sudo route add 100.64.2.3/32 via 10.1.1.1
$

(assuming that "10.1.1.1" is the gateway that you want OpenVPN to use, for connections to "my.openvpn.gateway").

It's not really an OpenVPN question, more a basic "how does my operating system know where to send packets to" thing.