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RSTUNNEL (Reliable SSH Tunnel)
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OVERVIEW
This is mainly intended for people who want/have a secure tunnel from one host to another. If you want to do any port fowarding from one network to another in a secure fashion this program can be very benefical.
For example, let's say you had an internal webserver in your office place and your at home and you wanted to see it from your house. You could use ssh to do port forwarding from your webserver at work to your computer at home. Your ssh config file would look like this "LocalForward 5000 10.0.0.254:80". "5000" is the port that is going to be listening on the local machine where your running the program. "10.0.0.254" is the IP of the internal host of the network your connecting to, and "80" is the port of the remote server that you want to forward to your network. This is just one example of many on how you can use rstunnel.
Now the beauty thing about rstunnel is that let's say the tunnel goes down (Trust me the tunnel goes down often when transfer alot of traffic through it, or when the net connection is slow ) it will make sure that the tunnel is running and acctually passing data through properly.
It is recommended that you run rstunnel in a cron job like this. "1,30 * * * * /usr/local/bin/rstunnel"
This will check twice an hour to see if the tunnel is running.
** NOW AVAILABLE **
rstunneld: Which will get rid of the cron use, and run rstunnel for you.
Right now if you want to edit any of the settings, just edit rstunneld directly.
To run it, just type "./rstunneld &".
REQUIRED SOFTWARE
In order for rstunnel to work properly, you'll need "bash", "ssh", and "blow".
The only speacial binary that you'll need is "blow". "blow" source is now
packaged with rstunnel, so when you run rstunnel for the first time, it will
install it for you. "blow" will work with SunOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. I havn't
tested any other platform. If you want to install "blow" manually you can
grab it from here;
"http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/net/suckblow"
INSTALL
The installation is preatty easy, just run "install.sh", and it will guide you through what needs to be configured. After running the "install.sh" script, and you want to do minor adjustments, just edit the "rstunnel.conf" file. This file will only exsist after you have ran the "install.sh" script. Once you finish with "install.sh", just run rstunnel and if there is any other adjustments, rstunnel will guide you through them.
If there is any problems or suggestions, please e-mail at; amram@manhattanprojects.com