If you're using WSL and the Boundary Client, be careful of where you "connect"

Boundary
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Suppose you’re using an environment with the Windows Boundary Desktop Client and WSL2 as your shell of choice.

If you start a connection within the Windows Boundary Desktop Client and try connecting through WSL2, it will likely fail.

This is because the default WSL2 settings will NOT copy listening ports from Windows into the WSL2 environment.

On the contrary, all listeners from WSL2 will copy into Windows, making this super confusing. So if you initiate a connection through WSL2, you’ll be able to access it through your Windows Machine such as a Powershell SSH connection or an HTTP connection in your web browser.

Spent several hours and headaches trying to figure out what was going on.

1 Like
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I didn’t even know that you could optionally change it such that windows listening ports are accessible from WSL. How do you do that?

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Since I ran into the same issue today: WSL2 supports Mirrored mode networking since a while.

Once enabled, Windows ports are exposed also on the Linux side in WSL2 and thus the SSH client on Linux will be able to connect to 127.0.0.1 address and port set up by Boundary. Gave it a few tests, worked fine for me.