This article deals with tunneling data for a variety of
applications through ssh: VNC, MySQL, and terminal emulators.
“SSH, the secure shell, is a very good commercial
product. However, there are various great free implementations of
ssh clients or servers available for Unix (commercial or free) or
for different OSes. The best known is OpenSSH, available from
http://www.openssh.org. From this website you can find alternatives
for Unix systems, Windos, Mac… For some products such as Windos
you only have free clients. In this article, we present a few
examples on how to use ssh to tunnel data from/to external
applications. VPN (Virtual Private Network) relies on ssh but in a
different way, much more elaborate than the one we take up here.
Another sophisticated solution, is to use VTun. Accordingly, let’s
consider this tunneling an easy and simple way to encrypt data in
an heterogeneous network to prevent it from being snooped.
Obviously, this is applicable to both local and remote networks.
However, remember ssh only encrypts data, it won’t make your
network secure on its own… You’ve been warned !”