Damn Port Forwarding Rocks

I don’t like using the corporate VPN. Why? It creates a new network interface on my machine and routes all traffic through it and thereby through my company’s network. I’d rather not have to disconnect to surf over to jsettlers.org for a quick match.

Recently I’ve started using VNC to work remotely on some tasks that require I be on my desktop.  But to do this I needed to use the VPN. Grr. VPN = BAD. So, I examined an example of  port to forwarding to the corporate wiki over an ssh connection.  I took a stab at setting up forwarding for VNC.

It wasn’t hard. The hardest part was figuring out that the vnc server on my work machine listens for connections on port 5900 + the display number (most likely 0 for you).  So I configured my ssh to forward local connections to port 5900 to my desktop ip address and port 5900. Once I establish my ssh connection I just fire up VNC and connect to localhost:5900 to connec to my desktop. Viola! The beauty in this is that I don’t have to start a program on the firewall machine and make sure it is running. When I establish my ssh connection it immediately “turns on” the port forwarding for on my local machine.

It’s all very powerful and very much related to my previous post “I Serve No More”.