Disclaimer - This post outlines how you can 'open up' firewalls to give you access where network administrators may not want you to go. Please realise that when applying these workarounds in a company you may be breaching corporate policy and end up in serious trouble.
The problem: Sometimes you end up in an environment where you don't quite have the liberal network access that you enjoy, let's say, at home. Network ports for services you have come to rely on such as Remote Desktop, Skype or MSN Messenger, have been closed for whatever reason. Sometimes for good reasons such as security, sometimes for sad reasons such as public WiFi access points that only want to offer you limited access.
The solution: Enter SSH (Wikipedia definition), which allows you to set up secure encrypted connections between machines. Most people may think SSH is just a glorified secure replacement for good old Telnet, but it has much more tricks up its sleeve, most notably a way of tunneling multiple connections for different destination ports over a single port. Sorry if this sounds confusing, it is the best way I can describe it.
Light at the end of the tunnel?
Before going into more detail and installation instructions, a quick discussion of the kind of problems you can solve using SSH tunneling. First and foremost, if you have no access at all to a network then SSH is not going to help you. All you need for SSH to work is a single open port.
Example 1: Accessing your home PC via remote desktop. One of my friends recently started a new job for an insurance underwriter. Unfortunately he cannot access his home PC via Remote Desktop as the company blocks port 3389. He can solve this by installing SSHD (server application) on his home PC to listen on a port he can access, e.g. port 443 or any other outgoing port that is not blocked by the company firewall. He can then use SSH (client application) to setup a connection from his work PC to listen on a port, e.g. 13389 and connect it to the Remote Desktop port (3389) on his home PC.
Example 2: Accessing a company server from the public Internet. Another friend's retarded boss has not paid the ADSL bill, which results in him having to use a fallback network connection that does not allow any connections to the internal network from the public Internet. The solution to his problem is to setup SSHD (server application) on his home PC and configure his home firewall to allow public access on port 22 (SSH) and one other port that will be used to set up a tunnel. He can then use SSH (client application) to setup a tunnel from his home PC to his office PC.
Installation: SSH and all related utilities originate, like so many network utilities, in the Unix domain. Fortunately most of these extremely useful Unix / Linux utilities have been ported to Windows as part of the excellent Cygwin project. Installation instructions for Cygwin including full instructions for setting up the OpenSSH SSHD Server are available here.
Once everything has been installed you can either use a user friendly Windows Utility such as Putty to setup tunnels or use the SSH command line utility. My personal experience with Putty is that it is an excellent terminal client, but that it is a bit sensitive to network hiccups when tunneling connections. Since I switched to the SSH command line utility things have been more stable.
To set up the tunnels for the above mentioned Example 1 use these settings:
- replace HOME_PC with the public IP-number of your home PC
- replace USER with the name of a user with login privileges on your home PC, e.g. Administrator.
- Install OpenSSH on your home pc as described previously.
- On your office pc start BASH from the Cygwin group and type the following command to setup the tunnel:
ssh -p 22 -C -L 13389:localhost:3389 USER@HOME_PC
This sets up an ssh connection on the standard port 22 to the SSHD running on the home pc. Once the connection has been established it creates port 13389 on the OFFICE_PC, which maps to the remote desktop port (3389) on the localhost SSHD is running on. The -C flag enables compression, which will give you a nice speed boost.
You can now connect to your home pc by opening the Remote Desktop Client on your office PC and typing localhost:13389. If you get a message that you cannot open a session to localhost then apply this workaround.
If port 22 is blocked then you can setup SSHD to listen on a different port. This setting is stored in C:\Program Files\Cygwin\etc\sshd_config (I have installed Cygwin in 'c:\progra~1').
That is all for now, I am not sure if this clarifies anything, but I hope it will be useful. This posting just scratches the surface of what you can do with SSH. Some of the other highlights are: using SSH as a SOCKS proxy, setting up multiple tunnels with one command, setting up reverse tunnels (-R switch) etc etc.
A similar article, focused on connecting to hosts outside of the corporate network using Linux can be found here. When using Cygwin 99% is the same as Linux anyway.