We think of SSH as just a simple Secure SHell, but did you know it can also forward ports? Yes, of course you did! We’ve all probably read this exact sentence in probably hundreds if not thousands of articles out there. What you probably haven’t read, is an article that summarizes all of the different options in a nice, concise and copy-pastable way.
“Forward” port … forwarding
(TODO)
Reverse port forwarding
You’re in a closed network – NAT, firewall, trigger-happy intrusion detection, etc. You have a service running at a local address on a local port. You have a remote server with SSH. You want to access remote server on remote port and have your traffic be tunneled to your internal service.
user@[local machine]:~/ $ ssh [remote server] -R [remote port]:[local address]:[local port] Example:
I’m at work on my workstation. I’m running a crappy NodeJS app on localhost port 80. I want to show it off to a recruiter because I hate this job, but the sysadmin knows I want to leave so he won’t let me forward a port. I have a cheap VPS at cheap-vps.no-ip.org and want expose my app on port 8080.
user@workstation:~/ $ ssh shitty-vps.no-ip.org -R 8080:localhost:80My shitty web app will now be accessible at http://shitty-vps.no-ip.org:8080/ and I will soon be safe from the stale coffee and bad hours of my current employer.