If you are looking to create a encrypted tunnel from one Linux instance to another, the bet choice is SSH port forwarding.
Secure Shell (SSH) has several really cool tricks up its sleeve, each of which offers a handy feature (wrapped in a comforting blanket of security) to help make your life a bit easier.
Last week, we discussed key authentication with SSH; this week we will talk about port forwarding, which can be used to:
- Access a server that you might not otherwise have access to.
- Access a remote machine with a bit more security involved.
- Grant a temporary, encrypted tunnel from your local machine to a remote machine.
There are three different types of SSH port forwarding. They are local (connections from a client are forwarded, via SSH, to a remote host), remote (connections from a remote server are forwarded, via SSH, to another machine), and dynamic (connections from different applications are forwarded, via SSH, to several servers).
There are many examples of port forwarding, some of which can get rather complicated. Because of this, we’re only going to deal with the first two types of port forwarding here (local and remote). These are also the types of SSH port forwarding that you’ll use the most.
SSH port forwarding is built into SSH by default, so as long as you have SSH installed, you should have everything you need to work with this feature.
With that said, let me show you how SSH port forwarding works.
