Split tunneling with AC86U, merlin

[unclebuk]

Hello,

I wish to know if it is possible to have a policy based rule/split tunneling setup on the AC86U for a web browser on my laptop? I want to send all traffic of TOR browser over the WAN.

Thanks,

 

[ColinTaylor]

I don't use TOR browser but it sounds like you're asking about port based routing. There are numerous threads about this. There's also a wiki entry but I don't know how up to date it is.

 

[eibgrad]

You can't split tunnel a specific app since the network knows nothing about what connections are specifically associated w/ that app. As @ColinTaylor suggests, to the extent you can *reliably* associate specific inbound/outbound ports and/or destination IPs w/ that app, you can then establish your own policy based routing and/or static routing to achieve those results. But as you might imagine, that can be tricky, if NOT impossible in many cases.

My recommendation (although a bit of a hassle to setup) is to create a VM to manage that app. Now you can use the VPN Director, since you can associate the unique local IP assigned to that VM w/ the app!

I've done this several times in the past. I'd install something like VirtualBox and add an Ubuntu guest VM. Then add my app and run it full screen. Finally, I'd used some form of remote desktop (RealVNC in my case) between the host and guest VM to make it appear to be running in its own window on the host desktop. To the casual observer, you wouldn't even notice the app was actually running on a VM.

These days, it might be easier to use containers (e.g., Docker), provided the host and guest are using the same OS. It just requires a lot less resources. And there may even be prebuilt images to accelerate development.