I just installed a fresh copy of debian (no GUI). I want all my traffic on bash (such as when I do ping or dig or wget, basically whatever) to be sent to localhost:8080. How can I do that? I've a ssh port forward setup that will forward all traffic arriving at my localhost:8080 to another server. Thanks guys

Have you thought of using iptables? The following, I believe, should redirect all TCP traffic to localhost:8080, by adding a rule to the OUTPUT chain of the network address translation table:

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8080

However, I'm trying to get my head round the concept of redirecting pings to a port... not sure that this is a meaningful thing to do, as ports are part of TCP/UDP, not ICMP as used by ping echo request/reply packets. On the other hand, iptables does accept the rule:

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p icmp -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:8080

Another thing to think about is that ports are used to distinguish different connections. If all traffic is going to be sent over a single tunnel, how is it going to be re-constituted at the other end? It might be necessary to think about which types of traffic you are going to need to forward, and establish a separate tunnel for each one.

Hi Robhogg
Thank you for getting back to me. Sorry I wasn't available over the weekend to try and reply to your proposed answer. So I tried what you said. I checked with
and saw the entry there. I also did a
to do a dynamic port forward
And then i did a test by running
Apparently, it was still trying to connect to a proxy that the system is set to use. What I had hoped is that it would send my wget request over to localhost:8080 and through the tunnel to the otherserver. The otherserver (it's another server on the local lan) would serve my request and give me back the results.
The reason I'm trying to do this is to avoid the proxy server that the system is set to use. I hope I'm making sense. Thanks again.

By "to a proxy that the system is set to use" do you mean some device between your computer and the Internet? A fresh install of Debian is not set up to use a proxy.

iptables does not affect IPv6 traffic (ip6tables doe that), either your connections are over IPv6 or the iptables rules are set-up wrongly; however that approach is completely wrong. When used with the -D option is a SOCKS server and needs to be used with a SOCKS client, for example socksify, however that will only support TCP connections.

To do what you want you need a VPN, OpenSSH provide basic support with the -w option, but is likely to be slow due to the poor performance of TCP over TCP.

Thanks for your input TimothyEBaldwin. Appreciate your help