I’ve got a Linux server running Xubuntu at the moment (It was a media player first), and it also runs two Minecraft servers for the family. It has two network cards that are both connected to the internet. Is there a way to bind the VPN to one of the cards and use the other one for regular use?

I’ve got Surfshark as my VPN, and it doesn’t allow port forwarding under Linux. I’ve got some software that I want to keep behind the VPN, but the lack of port forwarding is stopping me from sharing the Minecraft servers, and when the VPN is active, it slows down the connection to some of my services like Plex.

I’ve tried to look it up, but I just don’t know enough to get myself anywhere. I’ve found results that talk about name spaces and routing tables, but they assume a level of knowledge that I just haven’t got yet.

I want to use the Arr suite and qBittorrent as the main programs behind the VPN, and Plex, Mylar (a comic manager), Syncthing, and Minecraft as the main programs without it. If I set up qBittorrent and the Arrs as Docker containers, can I use Gluetun to bind just them to the VPN? The VPN is using OpenVPN connections if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance :)

  • @[email protected]English
    8•2 months ago

    Network namespaces!

    ip netns exec namespace command

    One namespace for surfshark, and anything you run in that namespace uses those rules

    • @[email protected]English
      9•2 months ago

      Network namespaces and policy based routing are black magic, IMO.

      I’ve got a VPN set up on my router and separate VLANs set up for ordinary traffic and VPN traffic. A device doesn’t need to support VPNs at all, I just connect it to the VPN VLAN and all its traffic goes over the VPN whether it likes it or not. I’ve got separate wifi SSIDs for each VLAN.

      My desktop is connected to both VLANs with a network namespace set up for the VPN VLAN, so sudo vpn rtorrent runs rtorrent in the namespace that’s connected to the VPN VLAN.

      My setup is nice, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to learn quite a bit about networking.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 months ago

          I mean, it’s bits of configuration all over the place that I’ve built up over time. It isn’t a single script on one machine, and you’d need to change a lot of things if you weren’t running Slackware. I can’t really copy and paste it all.

    • TipponOPEnglish
      2•2 months ago

      Apologies for the slow reply :)

      I’m reading up on this at the moment. If I’m understanding it correctly, I would run that command to launch a program, but could I use it for something that launches at startup?

      My Minecraft and Qbittorrent instances start automatically, so could I change them to something like

      ip netns exec vpn ~/qbittorrent/start.sh

      ip netns exec clear ~/minecraft/start.sh

      or change the application’s autostart Command box to ip netns exec vpn qbittorrent %U if the current entry is just qbittorrent %U

      Do these make sense?