[PLUG] Reverse SSH tunneling with HTTP proxy

[Erik Lane]

Hello,

I'm very possibly going about this the wrong way. I've tried all manner of
search terms that I can think of with variations of what I put in the
subject line.

Basically, for a long time it worked very well to just open an SSH
tunneling command to connect to the network at my dad's house to do
maintenance on the computers/networking equipment there. All was good until
he either changed providers or just had problems with his equipment. Either
way, he got a new modem, and instead of replacing his existing all-in-one
modem and router, he and/or the tech decided it would be safer to just add
the new modem upstream of the existing one, and just have two NAT
translations happening. This broke my port forwarding that I had working,
so I had to change how I got access. I don't know if he even has access to
the settings in the new modem - it's a Comcast thing, and he's not sure,
and I think he's also a little uneasy about the idea of changing anything,
since it's now working well and he went for a while with having things be
really flaky.

So to keep his stress level low, the first time afterwards that I went out
there I got onto the linux server that I have running there and set up a
persistent reverse SSH tunnel using autossh. It works great, and all I have
to do from my local server machine is run 'ssh -p 2222 localhost' and I get
connected and everything is good.

However, to do a fix for a current problem, I need to get http access to a
server running on that same machine. All of the logs make it look like it's
running fine, but they're reporting that something isn't right. Before, I
could set up a tunnel and use a proxy command to then connect from a local
machine to a port on the server at my dad's house and do whatever amount of
troubleshooting I needed. With the new reverse tunnel set up, it doesn't
seem to be accepting the proxy traffic, and I have no idea why.

Dad's server  Dad's old modem/router --- Dad's new modem --- internet ----
my modem/router --- my server --- my laptop

So I want to use firefox on my laptop to view content served from my dad's
server, but the only possible connection is currently through a reverse ssh
tunnel set up on my server. It seems like this must be a somewhat basic
thing to do, as all I want is for traffic sent to a chosen port on my
server to be rerouted through the existing SSH tunnel and then appear to
originate on my dad's private network so that it can then query the http
server and send the response back through the tunnel.

But maybe I'm trying to do this the hard way and there's a simpler
solution? Maybe I just don't know the right search terms to use? I could be
calling these things the wrong names. It's a bit of a drive to get out
there in person, and I'd like to get this running before the next time that
I'm planning to be there anyway, if possible.

Thanks!
Erik