SSH Port Forwarding

It's possible to forward a port to another port with SSH port forwarding.

For example, configure the forwarding settings that the 8081 on the local is forwarded to the 5901(VNC) on the local. This example shows simply setting but it's possbile to forward most ports to most ports on the local or on other servers.

Start a VNC process on display #1 with a user, next, Configure like follows.

# forward the connection to 8081 to 5901 on local
jessie@dlp:~$ ssh -L 0.0.0.0:8081:localhost:5901 jessie@localhost
jessie@localhost's password:   # the password of the working user (it means the login to local to local)
Last login: Sat May 2 22:11:22 2015 from 10.0.0.5
# confirm
jessie@dlp:~$ netstat -lnp | grep 8081
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8081            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1920/ssh

# keep this session and go next
# it's possbile to start the process on background as a daemon with "-f" option but then it needs to kill it by hand after working

Next, connect to the port configured above on the local.

Just connected like follows.

Port forwarding with Client Tools

It's possible to use the port forwarding function with tools which has it without configuring servers.
For example, connect to a server with VNC by using Putty's port forwarding.