Apple Newbie

I use SSH tunnels frequently as part of my system administration job to ‘forward ports on demand’ without punching forwarding ports into a firewall and get into internal PCs at remote sites.

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I used SecureCRT and Putty on my Windows workstation. They work great as SSH programs as Windows doesn’t come with a SSH tool by default.

Mac OS X does come with a SSH client, the same ones you can find on other UNIX operating systems. But it does get tiresome typing out a long command line with lots of -L and -R options to get the port forwards which I want.

So I found SSH Tunnel Manager. It’s an open source software by tynsoe and it comes with source code. It provides a GUI based front-end to manage your SSH tunnels instead of opening up Terminal and typing them out manually each time you need a tunnel.

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SSH Tunnel Manager is a front-end for the ssh command when used to open tunnels between two hosts. Those command lines are particulary long and confusing, especially for novices, and I never remember which argument comes first, if I have to open local or remote tunnels and so on… That’s why I wrote this tool. - tynsoe

This method can also be used to secure your data on a Wifi connection if you have access to an SSH server and the owner gives you permission to port forward. For example, simply tunnel your POP3 and SMTP ports through an SSH server using this method.

Tynsoe’s SSH Tunnel Manager is currently a version 1.0.3. Download it from tynsoe.org!