Using port forwarding with PuTTY

Using port forwarding with PuTTY

This page briefly describes how to use port forwarding using the PuTTY SSH client. Port forwarding is useful when you need to use certain services which are normally only available within the institute.

Suppose you want to setup your PC at home to use our internal proxy server.

First, start PuTTY, specify the host you want to connect to, e.g. shell.cs.uu.nl and the SSH protocol:

Then, click the "Tunnels" tab and specify local port, remote host and port and click the [Add] button:

Finally, press the [Open] button to start the session:

You can, of course, save your settings in the first tab (Session) before you press the [Open] button.

The above example is the equivalent to the UNIX 'ssh' command:

ssh -L 3128:proxy:3128 your_username_here@shell.cs.uu.nl

It will forward the local port 3128 to host 'proxy', port 3128, via the SSH connection. PuTTY is an SSH client, so it will still spawn a terminal window. When you're finished using your forwarded connection(s) you can close this window.