UDP and TCP Port Forwarding on the Same Port Number

[Nate Jones]

Hi,

A bit of background on the project I'm working on:
Me and my coworkers are working on an Android library called MANES that emulates local Adhoc (wifi direct) communication through a server cluster located in Amazon EC2. When applications based on this library want to send packets to other phones within Adhoc range, the library sends the data to our server cluster, which calculates what other phones are nearby the sending phone (using a combination of GPS coordinates and if they have access to identical wireless routers). The packets are then sent back from our servers to other phones that were found to be within range of the sending phone, and are forwarded from the MANES library to the correct application.

Our library sends packets to port 7889 (among others), utilizing both UDP and TCP protocols on the same port, and this has worked fine on our EC2 instances. We found Vagrant, and thought it could help speed production, and reduce costs of server maintenance, as we won't have to launch additional EC2 instances to test our server software.



The problem is, in Vagrant we are trying to forward both UDP and TCP packets from port 7889 on the host machine to the same port on the guest machine; however, only one of the two protocols is ever forwarded to the guest machine (which ever one is last in the Vagrantfile).

The following lines in the Vagrantfile seem to be the issue (I am using Vagrant 1.2.4-1, installed on Arch Linux):

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
# ... (database server is configured)

packet_config['count'].times do |i|

# Hostname is set
config.vm.define "#{hostname}" do |box|

box.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 7889, guest: 7889, protocol: :tcp
box.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 7889, guest: 7889, protocol: :udp

# ... (additional servers configured, and other settings)
end
end
end


This is part of the log that forwards the port:

INFO interface: info: Forwarding ports...
[packet-00] Forwarding ports...
 INFO subprocess: Starting process: ["/usr/bin/VBoxManage", "showvminfo", "af3ada75-94cd-4530-b5f3-e3315fcc5e8b", "--machinereadable"]
 INFO interface: info: -- 22 => 2200 (adapter 1)
[packet-00] -- 22 => 2200 (adapter 1)
 INFO interface: info: -- 7889 => 7889 (adapter 1)
[packet-00] -- 7889 => 7889 (adapter 1)
 INFO subprocess: Starting process: ["/usr/bin/VBoxManage", "modifyvm", "af3ada75-94cd-4530-b5f3-e3315fcc5e8b", "--natpf1", "ssh,tcp,127.0.0.1,2200,,22", "--natpf1", "7889,udp,,7889,,7889"]




Using tcpdump, we found that only UDP packets were being forwarded to the guest machine using the vagrantfile above, and when we switched the two lines around (UDP before TCP), only TCP packets were being forwarded (confirmed using the vagrant logs).

We were able to work around this using a vb.customize statement as follows, while removing the vm.network statements in the vagrantfile above:

box.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
        vb.customize [
                      "modifyvm", :id,
                      "--name", hostname,
                      "--memory", packet_config['memory'],
                      "--natdnshostresolver1", "on",
                      "--nataliasmode1", "sameports",
                      "--natpf1", '"tcp7889,tcp,,7889,,7889"',
                      "--natpf1", '"udp7889,udp,,7889,,7889"'
                     ]

This allowed us to forward both UDP and TCP packets.


Now, we have our software working on Vagrant fine now using this work-around, but I was wondering if the vb.customize statement is necessary, or if we should report a bug to the maintainers of Vagrant about being able to forward both TCP and UDP.

Thanks,
Nate Jones

[Michael Lex]

Hi,
I encountered the same problem. There is an older (closed) github-issue https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/1108 for vagrant 1.0. Now with vagrant 1.2 the bug re-appeared (see my comment for the issue #1108).

Can the issue be re-opened?

Greetings,
Michael