At one time we might need to bypass the firewall, and at another time we might need to secure / encrypt our connection, and for that we normally set up tunnel in SSH. Setting up tunnel itself is fairly easy, yet there are programs to make it even easier.
I’ve previously been introduced to gSTM (Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager) and I must say it’s a very helpful program. Here’s a one liner to install it Ubuntu / Debian;
shakir@gutsy ~ $ sudo apt-get install gstm
Just for an example, I’ll show how to tunnel port 80 (HTTP) of one of my other Linux box (under VMWare of course);
Let’s first create a tunnel
and login..
Edit how to redirect the remote box’s HTTP port
and test it out..
It works! 
5 Comments on this post
Leave a CommentI have no clue what you just did. The test part is extremely convoluted
Comment left on 2.6.2008 by hybrid
I’m wondering if you could go into a bit more detail. I’ve been trying to figure out how to port forward through a non-standard port on a router, (40000 range maybe) and then direct VNC through the port, without much luck.
But gSTM looks very promising (if only i had a clue what i was doing)
Comment left on 2.20.2008 by Chris
What the author describes is a “normal” forward tunnel, not a reverse tunnel. A reverse tunnel would be to make a port available on the remote server through which to connect back to your client, so e.g. you can connect to your home PC from the office, let a job run, go home and then verify the results via VNC or RDP from home by connecting back through the reverse tunnel. This should also be straightforward with gSTM, because it already is easy enough with the ssh command line. Keeping the tunnel open (auto-reconnect from client to server) should be easy enough using autossh. Probably gSTM also offers a keep-alive option, I do not know. I never used that tool, I merely stumbled upon it just now.
Comment left on 2.25.2008 by Alexander Kriegisch
There is the same tool for KDE ?
Comment left on 4.13.2008 by GbMax78
You can compress traffic just adding one line of code, like in my review
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gstm/reviews/
Comment left on 11.14.2012 by Diego Kesselman