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The Illustrated Guide to SSH Port Forwarding

SSH is a powerful tool for accessing remote systems. This guide will illustrate one of the more confusing and poorly documented capabilities of the ssh command on Linux: port forwarding. Port forwarding is a way to “tunnel” any TCP protocol through a secure, encrypted SSH connection. It can also be used to make network connections transparent to the applications that are using them. The diagram below shows a user with an application running on a local machine (Client), such as a laptop. The app needs to interact with a server hosted on a remote host (Protected) which is isolated behind a login node (Login). This situation may occur when a user wants to run a management or admin GUI for a database such as MySQL or MongoDB. In a production environment, a database server is never exposed directly to the internet. Database connections on a private network are often unencrypted to maximize speed. SSH port forwarding can be used to connect the GUI to a database on a remote server. Forwarding is also used for running visualization applications on a GPU node that is located behind the login node on a high-performance computing cluster.

SSH Port Forwarding

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