Linux: configure custom routing table id in client

[RSpliet]

To the best of my knowledge, on Linux by default route changes get committed to the "main" table 254. I would like to be able to configure my OpenVPN client to use a different routing table instead.

The problem I try to solve is routing traffic from some daemons over a VPN connection, but not traffic from other applications or daemons. An elegant solution would be for IPTables to mark traffic from applications running as a certain user- or group-id with a particular index i, e.g. "iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m owner --uid-owner [uid] -j MARK --set-mark 10" Using "ip rule add fwmark 10 table [table-id]", I can then route traffic for those applications according to the routing table written by OpenVPN, while other traffic continues to use the default routing table.
Manually scripting up routing table entries may be possible using route-up scripts, but in the presence of dynamic IPs and pushed/pulled route changes this use-case might be cleaner to achieve with a simple "route-table" option in a VPNs configuration file.

[tct]

I can see the appeal but this is what external scripts are for.

[Gert Döring]

Yeah, I can see that this would be nice to have. It will not make 2.6.0 release, though.

For the time being, using {{--route-up}} scripts would be the best option then - and, this is fully dynamic(!), as OpenVPN will put all routes pushed by the server into environment variables, so the script has the full information available. So it's a bit of one-time hacking, but then you do not miss out on functionality.