SSH forwarding/tunneling?

midgetspy

Hey all,

At work I'm behind an HTTP proxy on a Windows box that I have full control over. I can't get outside unless it's through the HTTP or FTP proxy. I have my own personal linux server outside of the proxy, and I can successfully SSH to it using PuTTY and specifying the HTTP proxy info. The connection seems to time out after a few minutes, though, but I don't know if anything can be done about that or not.

I want to be able to use Remote Desktop to my home computer, but the client can't find my home computer because I can't specify the proxy info for it to use.

Is there a way to set up a SSH tunnel through my remote server and pointed to my home computer that allows me to Remote Desktop to localhost and have the connection passed outside to the Windows box? I know how to port forward to my remote linux/SSH server, but I'm not sure if/how I can get from there to my remote Windows box that I want to Remote Desktop to.

SiliconStew

RDP uses port 3389. Set up your home firewall/router/linux box to port forward a specific port (eg. 54321) to your home windows box's port 3389. Then in the RDP window on your work computer, type in (123.123.123.123:54321) where 123.123.123.123 is whatever your home's external ip address is and 54321 is whatever port you used in the first step.

Proxy settings basically just allow you to specify a different default gateway for traffic on a specific port.

The problem is, if your work is blocking outgoing connections except for http/ftp traffic then your are SOL unless you can install some sort of reverse proxy like http://www.orenosv.com/orenosp/index_en.html on both ends that accepts connections on port 443.

midgetspy

I can use SSH port forwarding over the HTTP proxy with PuTTY and then set up the remote port forwarding with iptables I think... I never even thought of the iptables part until you mentioned firewall, hehe. Gonna try right now, thanks!

taeric

SiliconStew wrote: »

The problem is, if your work is blocking outgoing connections except for http/ftp traffic then your are SOL unless you can install some sort of reverse proxy like http://www.orenosv.com/orenosp/index_en.html on both ends that accepts connections on port 443.

Not true. If you can get an SSH connection to the other machine, then you should be able to use tunneling for the rest of what you want.

There are two tricks you are going to have to pay attention to. First is that you need to point your remote desktop to localhost:xxx for the SSH tunneling to take it to your remote machine. This will send the connection to the linux machine on the other end of the tunnel. At this point, I think you can use nc (netcat) to send all connections from the linux machine to the correct machine. If you want, I can try to get a better description up on this.