Make a secret tunnel – Sarah Tanja’s Open Lab Notebook

1 How to setup a ‘tunnel’ into the remote server

Open a terminal ( I opened my WSL Ubuntu terminal 🐧) and make a .ssh directory in the home directory, and then open the nano text editor to write a config file in the .ssh folder:

mkdir .ssh nano ~/.ssh/config

Tip

The .ssh directory is hidden because it starts with a ., and you won’t see it unless you run ls -a

In the nano text editor I copied the following:

# secret tunnel     
Host <server>_tunnel         
    HostName <123.45.678.90>         
    User <username>         
    ControlMaster auto         
    ServerAliveInterval 30         
    ServerAliveCountMax 1200         
    ForwardX11 yes         
    LocalForward localhost:9000 127.0.0.1:9000

where:

<server> is the remote server name (make this short and sweet, since you will execute this as a command later on and must needs type it out)
<123.45.678.90> is the remote server IP address in the HostName field
<username> is the username setup for the remote server in the User field

I saved the config file by writing it out (Ctrl+X) and pressing Enter.

Next, I tested the tunnel by opening a new Linux Ubuntu terminal and running:

ssh <server>_tunnel

In addition, you can test direct access to the remote server (not using the tunnel) with:

ssh <username>@<IP-address>

The tunnel connected me to the remote server and prompted me to enter the password associated with my user on the remote server.

Tip

Once tunneled into the remote server you’ll notice the <username>@<server> in the terminal changes from your local computer to the remote server.