Manual Port Forwarding on Rancher Desktop Networking

[Nino-K]

During the experimental release of RD Networking, the port forwarding has to be performed manually. This is due to the privileged escalation (firewall prompt) that is required by the host-switch.exe. It is important to note that this will improve in the upcoming release and the manual step is no longer expected from our users.

When port forwarding is needed for e.g:

docker run --name mynginx1 -p 8801:80 -d nginx

In order to access the container via the exposed port manual step must be performed.

From WSL VM:

wsl -d rancher-desktop

Expose the desired port:

curl http://192.168.127.1:80/services/forwarder/expose -X POST -d '{"local":":8801","remote":"192.168.127.2:8801"}'

To Unxpose:

curl http://192.168.127.1:80/services/forwarder/unexpose -X POST -d '{"local":":8801","remote":"192.168.127.2:8801"}'

Related to: #3810

[Nino-K]

@gunamata @sunilarjun please make sure we include this limitation in the release notes, furthermore, this will change in the upcoming release.

[gunamata]

Thanks @Nino-K . Tagging @jandubois as he writes the release notes.

[jandubois]

@Nino-K Is 192.168.127.1 a fixed IP address, or the address of the Windows host?

[Nino-K]

The 192.168.127.1 is a fixed IP address, it's a gateway address in the virtual network. The gateway is the windows host (host-switch.exe) however, the IP address is not accessible from windows itself, it can only be accessed from within the network namespace (virtual network) for now.

[jandubois]

Oh, I see, I missed the wsl -d rancher-desktop part.

Maybe it would be better to tell people to use rdctl shell curl ... instead.

[Nino-K]

Maybe it would be better to tell people to use rdctl shell curl ... instead.

Oh, I didn't think about that, I will test and see if it works. If that works, that would be much better.

[Nino-K]

Once the attached PR is merged in, when the new networking is enabled you can use the following commands to expose and unexposed the ports.

expose:

rdctl shell curl http://192.168.127.1:80/services/forwarder/expose -X POST -d '{\"local\":\":8801\",\"remote\":\"192.168.127.2:8801\"}'

unexpose:

rdctl shell curl http://192.168.127.1:80/services/forwarder/unexpose -X POST -d '{\"local\":\":8801\",\"remote\":\"192.168.127.2:8801\"}'