Be A Command Line Superstar: SSH Tunnels

So here is my situation. I want to work at home. Or on the road or from anywhere except school. But the problem is that i have about 3 different lab machines at school that I have to do work on. But not only are they at school, they are also not accessible to the outside world. The only way to connect to them is through gateway machine. So i could first ssh to the gateway and then from there ssh to the server that I need to connect to. That works reasonably well, but it is a pain, and what if i need to copy files?

This is where ssh tunneling comes in handy. What tunneling does is it first creates a connection to a host/gateway - this is the tunnel. Now what you can do is make another connection through that first tunnel connection to some other host. It’s just like tunneling under a castle wall. This comes in handy for my situation where I need to pass traffic through a gateway. But another very powerful use is as an all-purpose tool for encrypting otherwise unsecure network protocols (e-mail, ftp, web traffic, etc.). Remember that all traffic through an ssh connection is encrypted. this includes tunnels. My main use for tunnels however is for bypassing gateways, so let’s see how it’s done.

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