Question

Send outbound traffic over floating IP

Posted on January 25, 2018
Ubuntu 16.04 Networking
Asked by enewel3

Is it possible to route outbound traffic from a droplet through its floating IP. I.e., make http requests from the droplet that appear to originate from the floating IP?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Andrew SB

DigitalOcean Employee

• January 25, 2018

Accepted Answer

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it depends on the software you are using to make the request. It needs to expose some way of binding to a particular interface. If it does, you’ll need to find what we call the “anchor IP” and use it. The easiest way to find the anchor IP is to inspect your Droplet’s metadata. From the Droplet, run:

curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/interfaces/public/0/anchor_ipv4/address

In my case, it returns 10.10.0.8 If you wanted to make your request with curl you could then use:

curl --interface 10.10.0.8 https://example.com

Or with wget you would use:

wget --bind-address=10.10.0.8 https://example.com

In both cases, example.com would now see the request as coming from my Floating IP not my Droplet’s IP address.

Check out this tutorial for more info on Floating IPs: How To Use Floating IPs on DigitalOcean In particular, see the section on “Droplet Anchor IPs.”

apexinvesting • January 22, 2019

Step 1. Run this command to get the gateway for the floating IP

curl -s http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/interfaces/public/0/anchor_ipv4/address

Step 2. Run this command to make all outgoing connections appear to come from your floating IP, where $gatewayip$ is the ip obtained from the previous command: