Using remote desktop over an ssh tunnel
This is kinda the nerdy way of remoting a pc on a remote network. Usually a vpn connection would be preffered, but in my case I don’t want to forward the rdp port of security reasons. Lets use my setup as an example: At home I have a server running Debian linux, I also have several windows pc’s that I want to be able to use remote desktop to. Since I have already forwarded the ssh port (22) to my Debian server I figured I could use it as a jumpstation. The way I solved this is somewhat similar to the PuTTY proxy trick guide that I posted earlier. Fire up PuTTY, enter the hostname or ip-adress of your remote network. Then navigate to Connection–>SSH–>Tunnels In the Source port field, type 127.0.0.3:3390 and in the Destination field type the internal ip of the pc you want to remote followed by…
PuTTY proxy trick
Did you know you use an SSH connection as a proxy using PuTTY? I didn’t until today 🙂 Fire up PuTTY but before you connect navigate to Connection–>SSH–>Tunnels. Here you can specify a port you want PuTTY to respond to proxy requests. Choose a port that is not in use on your localhost, I will use 8080 in this example. Choose Dynamic on Destination and click Add. In the forwarded ports part of the windows you will now see D8080. Connect to your host and open up your browser of choice. Specify the following in SOCKS proxy: 127.0.0.1:8080 Now you will tunnel your traffic through the SSH host you connected to. This trick works for all applications that support SOCKS proxy, not just browsers.