The Secure SHell, or SSH, is a simple but effective tool for encrypted remote login to a Linux-based workstation or server. Not only does it give you secure command-line access to the remote PC, but it can also be used to securely redirect data to be routed or processed on the remote PC’s LAN such as HTTP traffic or perhaps another protocol such as Jabber that is blocked on your local Internet connection. This process is called tunneling.

Creating an SSH tunnel is easy. Say you wanted to forward the local port 2100 to a web server inside your remote network on IP 192.168.0.99. The public hostname of the SSH server you are using to connect to is myserver.com. You can issue the command:

$ ssh jbloggs@myserver.com -L 2100:192.168.0.99:80 -N

…this will redirect local port 2100 to port 80 on the server with LAN IP 192.168.0.99 on the remote network, via the Internet-accessible SSH server on myserver.com, logging into it as the user jbloggs. Everytime you now access http://localhost:2100 with your web browser, your traffic will be redirected to the remote web server, using an encrypted tunnel over the Internet.

Now this is great, but that command line looks a bit convoluted. Isn’t there a more intuitive way to create an SSH tunnel?

There sure is – a neat little Gnome GUI app called the Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager or gSTM for short.

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