SSH Tunnels and Bouncing

I have a workstation at my office, drewble, that has a non-routable IP address. Our network is setup such that, even from the VPN, I can’t access that machine directly — I have to go through one of our dev servers to get to it. Obviously, having to hop from one machine to another is a bit cumbersome, but as with many thing, this can be alleviated with some simple Unix magic. A simple alias in my .bashrc makes the bouncing simple:

alias drewble="ssh -f -N dev1 -L 9999:drewble.genius.local:22; ssh -D7070 -p 9999 drew@localhost"

The first SSH command in this alias goes to the dev server, dev1, setting up a forward of the local port 9999 to the SSH port, 22, on my workstation, drewble, found via its zeroconf hostname. The -f options causes SSH to background after logging in and -N means that SSH won’t run any commands after loggging in; I only care about forwarding ports. The second command utilizes the tunnel setup on port 9999 to get me to the workstation, setting up a dynamic tunnel on port 7070 which can be used as a SOCKS proxy by things like my web browser.