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My question is basically the same as Only allow certain outbound traffic on certain interfaces.

I have two interfaces eth1 ( and wlan0 ( My default route is for eth1. Let's say I want all https-traffic to go through wlan0. Now if I use the solution suggested in the other question, https traffic will go through wlan0, but will still have the source-address of eth1 ( Since this address is not routeable for the wlan0 gateway, answers won't ever come back. The easy way would be to just set the bind-addr properly in the application, but in this case it is not applicable.

I figure I need to rewrite the src-addr:

# first mark it so that iproute can route it through wlan0
iptables -A OUTPUT -t mangle -o eth1 -p tcp --dport 443 -j MARK --set-mark 1
# now rewrite the src-addr
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -o wlan0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j SNAT --to

Now tcpdump sees the outgoing packets just fine and ingoing packets arrive for, however they probably never end up in the application, because all I ever get to see, is that the application is resending the SYN-packet, although the SYN-ACK was already received.

So I thought, maybe I need to rewrite the incoming address too:

iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i wlan0 -p tcp --sport 443 -j DNAT --to

but that didn't work either. So I’m kind of stuck here. Any suggestions?

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2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

You're close.

The actual reason that the application isn't seeing the return traffic is because of the kernel's built in IP spoofing protection. I.e., the return traffic doesn't match the routing table and is therefore dropped. You can fix this by turning off spoofing protection like this:

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.conf.wlan0.rp_filter=0

But I wouldn't recommend it. The more proper way is to create an alternate routing instance.

  1. The mark is necessary. Keep it.
  2. Source NAT is also necessary.
  3. The final DNAT is unnecessary, so you can remove it.

Make sure you have the iproute package installed. If you have the ip command then you're set (which it looks like you do, but if not get that first).

Edit /etc/iproute2/rt_tables and add a new table by appending the following line:

200 wlan-route

You then need to configure your new routing table named wlan-route with a default gateway and create rules to conditionally send traffic to that table. I'll assume your default gateway is Naturally this needs to match your actual network, and not just my assumptions.

ip route add default via dev wlan0 table wlan-route
ip rule add fwmark 0x1 table wlan-route

Your final annotated script would look like this:

# Populate secondary routing table
ip route add default via dev wlan0 table wlan-route
# Anything with this fwmark will use the secondary routing table
ip rule add fwmark 0x1 table wlan-route
# Mark these packets so that iproute can route it through wlan-route
# now rewrite the src-addr
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Thanks for taking the time to look into this. However, this is already what I was using, (as described in the other question) so i have the additional route set up, but it's still the same. The SYN-ACKs get back to but apparently never reach the application. –  rumpel Sep 20 '11 at 18:06
Go back and read my answer again. I addressed that. –  bahamat Sep 20 '11 at 19:14
The part about the spoofing protection? No change even after trying. Sorry, read it back&forth a couple of times, but didn't yet get what I am missing. –  rumpel Sep 20 '11 at 19:23
You need to add a src option to the ip route commands to specify the correct source address. –  David Schwartz Sep 23 '11 at 10:51
@DavidSchwartz: the POSTROUTING SNAT will take care of that. –  bahamat Sep 23 '11 at 21:06
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bahamat's solution is correct; however, please note that the only way for me to make this work was to disable the rp_filter for every interface in the system, not only the two (eth1 and wlan0 in this case) involved in the NATing.

for f in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter; do echo 0 > $f; done

(see the IMPORTANT note at the end of this page: Advanced Routing Howto -- the link posted there doesn't exist anymore, but I found it through the wayback machine)

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