after setting up my vnc tunnels through ssh to my remote machines i figured i might as well share this small bit of fun i'm having. i've read lots of posts of how to surf through proxies but what if you want to (on your lunch break of course ) work on one of your websites that you have on your home computer's webserver while at work, but would rather the traffic be encrypted?

well it's actually really easy to either use putty or openssh to redirect http traffic over ssh to your remote machine!

1) start up putty or openssh and create a connection from your work computer's port 8080 to your home computer's port 80 like this:

ssh -l <username> <homeIPaddress> -L 8080:127.0.0.1:80

then in your web browser type in:
http://localhost:8080/
and you are then browsing your home webserver's pages completely encrypted! it just looks like you have an ssh session open from your computer1

enjoy
disorderly

Setting up SSL would be a good way as well

I use a similar strategy to get to my home computers. I have three of them that I occassionally need to access from work, and multiple ports on one of those.

However, the work firewall only allows one outgoing non-proxied port (port 22). So I can't use my router to port-forward different incoming connections to different computers on my home LAN, since I am limited to only one port outgoing from work. I want non-proxied because my firewall and router at home only let in my specific work PC's IP address, not the work proxy's IP address. I wish to keep it that way for security.

ssh port forwarding to the rescue.

I have rules like:

L 10080:192.168.0.1:80
L 20080:192.168.0.2:80
L 30080:192.168.0.3:80
L 34999:192.168.0.3:4999

You can kind of see how the choice of my local ports map to the remote IP/ports I want to connect to. That just makes things easier to remember at work. You're not limited to only forwarding ports to the single remote host that is accepting your ssh connection. You can use that ssh host to bounce to anywhere it can talk to itself.