ClearlyIP’s Tips and Tricks
SSH Port Forwarding
Consider the following network diagram on which the IP-PBX and phones are behind a firewall/router.
When it comes to offering support to a customer in this scenario, it is very common to have the end-user or customer, open port 22 for remote access using SSH protocol.
So what happens when we need access to another different port, for example, port 80 or 443 to access the WebGUI?
Let’s say we need also to check one of the IP-Phone’s Web GUI as well.
How do we solve this if we only have one port opened to that network?
Well, the easiest method is by forwarding ports using SSH. This is also known as SSH-tunnel. Although this can be easily done using a single command from our terminal, if we were Linux users, we will show this time how to achieve this for those who use Windows as their main operating system.
Although there are many SSH clients for windows out there, today we will show you how to do it with Kitty SSH client .
So, according to the diagram, we will establish an SSH connection to IP 220.127.116.11 on port 22. Once the connection is established, let’s say we need to connect to the IP-PBX WebGUI on port 443 and to a phone’s Web GUI with internal IP Address 192.168.1.10.
The first step is to right-click on the client’s window and select the option ‘Change Settings’
Then go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels
In ‘Source port’ enter your PC’s local port. Most users enter port 8080, or 8088. It could be whatever port, but we use these ones because they are easy to remember and won’t be probably used by any other application.
In ‘Destination’ enter the internal IP address and the port you want to connect to.
When entering the information click on the “Add” button.
For our example, we will enter the following:
Finally, once the SSH tunnels have been established, we can reach ports 443 and 80 from our PC using a web browser and enter the following:
For port 443 ( since it is using HTTPS protocol)
For port 80: