ANSWERED Split Tunnel as Child or Subprocess?

[taikeru 0]

hello, i've been tinkering with the AirVPN suite for a bit now on Artix Linux (openRC), and so far everything is pretty painless to set up. (immense thanks to the airvpn team for this software suite, it's very nice)

i do have a question about cuckoo, though, as it seems to be a bit touchy with being launched via desktop file (via Exec line) or as a child of another (i.e. putting cuckoo -r "%command%" in a Steam game launch parameters).
is this behavior supported? i'm perhaps missing something reading the documentation, but it is a little sparse about how cuckoo can be used and to what extents it will not work.

testing has shown to me that via terminal, 

cuckoo -r "<command>"

seems to work as expected (i've added my user to the airvpn group)
but via .desktop file, any permutation of the launch command seems to launch cuckoo, as it does show the cuckoo version banner (when launched via gio or gtk-launch) but it does not seem to receive the rest of the args from Exec and will not launch the given command

Exec=cuckoo -r "<command>"
Exec="cuckoo -r <command>"
Exec=cuckoo -r \"<command>\"

this is more of a nitpick, as i've got no problem writing a couple of wrapper scripts for apps that i need tunneled outside of AirVPN, so i'm more interested in the details.
i would like to know if it is or will ever be supported though, as it would be nice to have something along the lines of a 

mullvad-exclude %command%

syntax for Steam game launch parameters that would allow me to test specific games off the VPN (and maybe for competitive games, where i'd rather not have a major spike in ping) Edited ... by taikeru
specify linux platform and sys daemon

[Staff 10608]

@taikeru

Hello!

Thank you for your great feedback about the Suite software, much appreciated by the development guys too.

Provided that the desktop user is in the airvpn group, the usage you mention should be possible with some caveat, as cuckoo needs a tty. Can you please add the following line to the .desktop file:

terminal=true

and test again?

Kind regards
 

[taikeru 0]

8 hours ago, Staff said:

Provided that the desktop user is in the airvpn group, the usage you mention should be possible with some caveat, as cuckoo needs a tty. Can you please add the following line to the .desktop file:

terminal=true

and test again?

setting terminal launch does work, and launches the application as expected in the cuckoo traffic namespace, but only when launched via gtk-launch or gio. this returns to my initially observed behavior (no launch of application) when the desktop file is launched via an app launcher like fuzzel or rofi. 

additionally, i tested launching both fuzzel and rofi through terminal and attempting to launch the .desktop file from there, to no avail. the cuckoo version banner appears, but the program does not launch. i imagine i could wrap the Exec param in a forced-terminal launch, but that may defeat the purpose of having a 'one-liner' for cuckoo launch.

if i might ask, why does cuckoo require a tty? it seems like a program that should support being launched without terminal output. Edited ... by taikeru

[Staff 10608]

@taikeru

Hello!

We're glad to know that terminal=true solves the problem. fuzzel and rofi honor the Terminal=true field in .desktop files but they manage it according to their own settings. Please check.
 

13 hours ago, taikeru said:

why does cuckoo require a tty?

For stdout - but a future version can be tty-aware, stay tuned.

Kind regards
 

[taikeru 0]

10 hours ago, Staff said:

We're glad to know that terminal=true solves the problem. fuzzel and rofi honor the Terminal=true field in .desktop files but they manage it according to their own settings. Please check.

it seems that fuzzel and rofi do have separate args to launch forcing a terminal, this would be more of a user configuration issue than an issue with cuckoo.
 

10 hours ago, Staff said:

For stdout - but a future version can be tty-aware, stay tuned.

this would be nice, though i've more come to the realization that it is more due to the environment and variables passed to cuckoo rather than a fault within cuckoo.

i assume i'm not the first to come across this, but a simple, hacky wrapper using script to create a PTY and launch cuckoo within it gets the job done

#!/bin/sh

if pgrep -x bluetit >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	exec script -qfec "cuckoo -r \"$@\"" /dev/null
else
	exec "$@"
fi

of course, must check if bluetit is running so the namespace file exists.

again, thanks to the AirVPN team for both the elaboration and the Suite.