Use ssh with a specific network interface
Solution 1
It's not the ssh client that decides through which interface TCP packets should go, it's the kernel. In short, SSH asks the kernel to open a connection to a certain IP address, and the kernel decides which interface is to be used by consulting the routing tables.
(The following assumes you're on GNU/Linux; the general concept is the same for all Unices, but the specifics of the commands to run and the way the output is formatted may vary.)
You can display the kernel routing tables with the commands route -n and/or ip route show.
OpenConnect should have added a line for the tun0
interface;
connections to any address matching that line will be routed through
that interface. For example, running route -n
on my laptop I get
the following output:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
0.0.0.0 10.30.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
10.30.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 eth0
192.168.122.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 virbr0
This means that connections to hosts in the 192.168.122.0/24 (i.e., addresses 192.168.122.0 to 192.168.122.255 according to CIDR notation) network
will be routed through interface virbr0
; those to 169.254.0.0/16 and
10.30.0.0/24 will go through eth0
, and anything else (the 0.0.0.0
line) will be routed through eth0 to the gateway host 10.30.0.1.
Solution 2
I don't know when it was introduced but the OpenSSH client on RHEL7 has this in its manpage:
-b bind_address
Use bind_address on the local machine as the source address of the connection. Only useful on systems with more than one address.
Not as good as being able to choose the interface, but close.
Solution 3
Just addition of an Answer. You can use -b
flag and define your source IP at access time.
Format + Example
ssh -b interface-ip remote-ip
ssh -b 10.11.22.40 10.11.22.38
Solution 4
If you are using Network Manager to manage your internet connections (as is the default manager on many systems), you may want to install both openconnect
and network-manager-openconnect
.
Once the OpenConnect plugin is installed for Network Manager, open Network Manager and click the + icon in the lower-left. You should be given a combo-box with the option VPN and then the ability to select OpenConnect Compatible VPN.
By using Network Manager to interface with OpenConnect, your routes will automagically appear and help you connect to the VPN. This is especially helpful for accessing servers over VPN, such as how FireHost does things.
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axel22
Principal researcher at Oracle Labs. Previously a software engineer at Google, and before that a doctoral assistant at the EPFL and a member of the Scala team, interested in programming languages, data structures, concurrent and distributed computing. Author of the book Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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axel22 almost 2 years
I'm using
openconnect
to connect to vpn. After entering my credentials, I get this:POST https://domain.name/... Got CONNECT response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK CSTP connected. DPD 30, Keepalive 30 Connected tun0 as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, using SSL Established DTLS connection
Running
ifconfig
shows I have a new network interfacetun0
with a certain ip address.Question: How do I make
ssh
use only the network interfacetun0
so that I can access computers on that private network?Edit:
My network configuration (
route -n
) seems to be this:172.16.194.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 vmnet8 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 172.16.25.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 vmnet1 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 eth0
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Eli Heady almost 13 yearsCan you elaborate on your network configuration? With proper routing in place, any traffic destined for the network attached to tun0 will use that interface.
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axel22 almost 13 yearsThanks for clarifying this for me - it seems that
openconnect
did not add a line for thetun0
interface. I suppose I should do this manually. -
heyman almost 13 years@axel22 You might have a look here: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=69064 for a script that uses openconnect and sets up the routes.
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Mathiewz over 11 years@RiccardoMurri Would you like to answer my question
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Henrik over 5 yearsAlso the
-B
flag, which appears to allow for specifying the name of the network interface to use. -
John about 5 yearsThe option
-b bind_address
did not work for me, somehow. Changing routes temporarily should work. BTW: The-B
option does not exist on the SSH version that comes with Ubuntu. -
iBug over 3 years@John Even when bound to an interface, it still depends on the kernel routing table, except that it'll match
iif
(outgoing interface) routing rule entries (i.e.ip rule
).