Forward Port SSH Windows

Here is a good example on how to use Putty (a great, free, SSH client for Windows) to set up SSH tunnels. This lets you forward ports and generally work around various network issues, possibly including firewalls, proxy servers, a poor-man's VPN, or in my case, non-routable networking issues.

The example is for VNC, but the same technique would work for just about anything.

http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/computing/docs/vnc.html

The goal is a line in putty that looks like:
L3389 home.sample.com:3389

A really comprehensive thread at slashdot on various ways to use SSH port forwarding - note to self, do some research on this SOCKs proxy stuff: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/19/2218226
After trying the dynamic thing mentioned in the slashdot article, I'm sold. It's much easier.
Just go to Putty->Configuration->Category/Connection/SSH/Tunnels.

"Add new forwarded port. Source Port: 1080, Destination: [blank], DYNAMIC (this is important), Auto. Click on Add. In Firefox or any other program that supports a SOCKS proxy, enter host 127.0.0.1 (localhost) with port 1080. That's it. You'll then be using your SSH connection like a SOCKS proxy." - anonymous coward.

Funny, "localhost" sometimes doesn't work. I needed to put in 127.0.0.1 - maybe it's a Vista thing?

sshuttle - Linux / OSX / "VM" - seems to be a layer over SSH to dynamically forward ports as needed? a poor mans VPN - https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle
3rd party proxy nat buster thing aimed at sharing localhost dev sites to outside test user / customer - https://ngrok.com/ - thought I had notes about a similar thing before.

Tags: Tunnel, 3389, 5900, RDP, static, sshd, proxy, socks, putty