How to forward only torrent traffic through a VPN

Question

I have an computer setup with Ubuntu Server, and I have a few things running on it, like a Plex server, radarr, and deluged. I have an OpenVPN that I pay for, and I want to only route torrent traffic for deluged through the VPN, without routing connections from outside computers to deluged through the VPN. I have seen tutorials on how to setup Deluge on another account and only use the VPN on that account, but that wouldn't work in my case. I have found that I need to figure out how to set torrent traffic to only run on a specific port or range of ports, and I need to have those ports configured with IPtables to go through the VPN interface, but I can't figure out how to do these. Any help would be really appreciated.

Solution

OK. You have two options to do this.

Option 1: Through a VPN split tunnel (which is the specific word for what you describe above). Tunneling the traffic of only one application. Here is a tutorial on how to do this. It is not a matter of 5 minutes and you will need a bit of proficiency in computing.

The tutorial explains it on a Linux system. If you are on Windows, it is probably the best not to waste your time with it... or if it really matters to you than install a fresh Ubuntu and do everything according to the tutorial.

Option 2: Through a SSH tunnel (say Secure Shell tunnel) As you only wanna route one specific port you need to do this through a SSH tunnel to the other server. This works much better than trying to reconfigure the whole VPN setup, which is tricky. On a Windows system that would be with Putty (please google putty ssh tunnel port forwarding). On Linux, again, this is much easier as you type just one line into your bash shell. As shown here in this tutorial.

Comments

[Keith Tweed]

I'm not using a router for this, I was hoping to just use IPtables to route specific ports through the OpenVPN client. I'm running Ubuntu Server 18.04 if that helps at all.

[Scott - Слава Україні]

You wave your hands very well, and you seem to have a good vocabulary of buzzwords. Can you provide specific instructions on how to do this? Please do not respond in comments; edit your answer to make it clearer and more complete.