I have a couple of devices at home that provide http servers on my local network. I have them tucked nicely behind my firewall so that they are not accessible from the outside, but occasionally, I would like to login to them to perform some reconfiguration or the like. This is where ssh comes to the rescue: you can use it to create a secure tunnel, a port that I can connect to on my local machine that gets routed to my remote machine through my firewall.

The problem is, I can never remember the command, and it takes me a few minutes of thought to reconstruct it. So, I thought I’d write it down here so I’d remember.

The basic command is:

ssh -f mylogin@myserver.com -L 20000:192.168.1.132:80 -N

When I enter http://localhost:20000 on my machine, it’s as if I was accessing the web page on 192.168.1.132 on my local network. Very useful.