I am a college student and my university has a very large wireless network here at school. I have a Linux machine at home that is running Samba and SSH. I have a junky old laptop that I use to connect to my Linux server, but what I really want to do is have a VPN connection to home so that I can use SMB to have file access to home. I would like to tunnel this through SSH for simiplicity and for security reasons.

I seem to have a lot of trouble with my Win32 SSH client, though. It's not quite as simple to use as a command line SSH client, and the tunneling settings are confusing to me. There are two types of tunnels that I can set up. Below are the options involved...

INCOMING...
Type: TCP or FTP
Listen Port: 0-65535
Destination Host: hostname
Destination Port: 0-65535

OUTGOING...
Type: TCP or FTP
Listen Port: 0-65535
Local Connections Only: True or False
Destination Host: hostname
Destination Port: 0-65535

Now, this may all seem a bit cut-and-dry to most of you, but it seems a bit ambiguous to me. If I want to tunnel a connection of any sort between my laptop (localhost) and my server at home (DNS_NAME) then what should I have for the Destination Host option on Incoming? On Ougoing? Do I need to set up a connection both ways or is the Incoming section only for connection initiations rather than responses?

Also, can anyone tell me what ports I need to be concerned about?


Thanks in advance for any help you might offer.

Okay, I've got a theory that the reason this isn't working is because my connection is going through to the Linux server at home, but I'm not getting a response. Apparently browsing is done through UDP, so that makes sense, since you can't forward UDP through SSH (to my knowledge).

My new question is how can I monitor the traffic on a by-packet basis on the linux machine via the SSH command prompt while trying to access files through the tunnel so that I can verify this theory (that connections are going through one-way)?

You're quite right...
but,
ssh gives you a single connection, not a tunnel..
You can add port forwardings to it, but it's still not a tunnel.
No broadcasts will go down there unles you have a redirector doing it at both ends..

Even though you are going through some NAT boxes in between, you can use PoPtoP effectively as a VPN.

Take a look at OpenVPN.

http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/

Which one is better? OpenVPN or PopTop?