When accessing a remote Unix system from a windows machine, it is very common to be given shell access via SSH. It is also very common to need being forwarder port 80 (for web configuration of the system) and port 8080 (for QueueMetrics); and this is a hassle to set up for remote system administrators who need to forward not one but three ports on their firewall.

By using PuTTY, it is possible to enable “tunnelling”, so that one or more remote ports (endpoints) are connected to some other ports on the local machine.

To do this, open up PuTTY and select :

  • Connection -> SSH

Set Enable compression: yes and Preferred SSH version: 2 (the latter is not necessary, but it’s better security)

  • Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels

We want to connect the local port 9090 to port 8080 of the remote server. Go to the Add new forwarded port and enter: Source port: 9090 and Destination: 127.0.0.1:8080. Press Add. This means that the remote SSH tunnel will try to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 and that will be teleported to the loacl machine’s port 9090. You can add as many ports as you like this way.

See also

Thanks to Richard B. for input!«