Josh and KD Curtiss

SSH Tunneling Tips

With SSH, you can perform all sorts of magic to make your computers talk with each other. Here’s some tips to keep it straight.

Quick SOCKS proxy

ssh -N -D 1234 user@domain.com

This will make a -N non-interactive session that will -D dynamically handle port forwarding if you set it up.

A common way to handle this is to go into your browser’s proxy settings and turn it on with:

SOCKS Host: localhost
Port: 1234 (whatever you set it to)

If you can, enable “Proxy DNS when using SOCKS”.

You can now browse through your remote server’s connection, having access to all of its local network devices!

Port Forwarding

You can tell the connection to forward a port’s traffic to or from the remote server to somewhere else.

For instance:

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 user@domain.com

This will forward your -L local port 5901 to localhost:5900 on the remote server.

ssh -L 5901:myotherserver.local:5900 user@domain.com

This will forward you -L local port 5901 to myotherserver.local:5900 accessible from the remote server. So the remote server is thus acting as a go-between for you and some other device on the remote network.

You can actually do the reverse of -L local port forwarding with -R remote port forwarding.

ssh -R 1234:localhost:1234 user@domain.com

This will send traffic from on your port 1234 to the server’s localhost:1234.