Recently, I had the need to set up a Linux machine so that I could put it behind a home router with no special configuration, and still access the machine from anywhere. Machines behind home routers are normally difficult to access from the outside world for two reasons: dynamic IP addresses and network address translation.

Dynamic IPs mean you don’t know, without being behind the same home router, what the IP address to connect to is at any given time. Network Address Translation makes it impossible to connect to a machine behind a home router unless the router is specifically configured to allow it.

However, nothing about this arrangement disallows the machine behind the home router from making outbound connections, and thanks to the flexibility of SSH tunnels, we can use this to create a simple, self configuring and healing connection allowing us to SSH into the machine behind the home router.

Here’s the different pieces of hardware that play into the story:

HostA: This is a Linux machine with a known and publicly accessible IP address. Its best if the IP address is static. In my case it’s a VPS on Linode, but any Linux machine accessible via SSH can work. No root access or special configurations are required.

Router: This is the home router. For our purposes it’s just a standard Linksys router with no special configuration, and we do not have access to its control panel.

HostB: This is the Linux machine you will put behind the home router. Again, full root access is not required, only a user account. It’s assumed that we will lose physical access to this machine once its placed behind the home router, but can configure it as we wish before then.

HostC: another Linux machine of any type and network location, where we have direct physical access.

Given these machines, the requirement is simple: allow us to SSH from HostC to HostB.

SSH Tunnel Primer

One of the most powerful abilities of SSH is to set up port forwarding (much like might be done on a home router), but ensure the forwarded traffic is routed through a secure connection created by SSH.

One of the classic uses for SSH tunnels is in fact exactly what we need to get around the restrictions put in place by the router. If we execute the following command on HostB

ssh -R 10022:localhost:22 HostA

then we can connect to HostB from HostA this way:

ssh -p 10022 localhost

How does this work? The first command tells SSH to set up a secure port forwarding from port 22, where SSH is listening, on HostB, to port 10022 on HostA. The router does not disallow HostB from initiating outbound connections, so this command does not fail. Users other than root can set up sockets on ports above 1024 without issue, so this also doesn’t require any special permissions on HostA.

However, currently, this command would have to be run manually on HostB, and it simply drops us into an SSH session to HostA. As soon as that session was closed, or as soon as there was a network issue causing the SSH session to terminate, our tunnel to HostB terminates as well. A little more work is required to create a foolproof setup.

Setting up a hands-free SSH tunnel

To facilitate setting up persistent port forwarding, SSH has two handy options: -N, and -f. Combining these two with our command above will send SSH into the background after initializing our port forwarding. With this, a simple cron job can ensure that we have a connection to HostB even if the network temporarily goes down or HostB is rebooted. However, it will create a new SSH connection every time, which is at best inefficient, and at worst can consume all the resources on one of our machines.

How then, can we check if there is already a connection from HostB to HostA, and only initialize a connection when needed? Let’s take a look at another SSH port forwarding command:

ssh -L 19922:HostA:22 HostA

If run from HostB, this will set up a port forwarding from port 19922 on HostB, to port 22 on HostA, essentially the reverse of the previous forwarding. We can already ssh to port 22 on HostA directly from HostB, but now, we can also SSH to HostA from HostB with the following command:

ssh localhost -p 19922

Since port 19922 is only active when our ssh tunnel is in place, this allows us to check for the tunnel’s existence: if our tunnel is down, SSH will fail with a connection error.

One final trick SSH gives us is the ability to set up multiple port forwardings in one command. With that, our complete solution can be written in a simple bash script:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 createTunnel () { /usr/bin/ssh -f -N -R 10022:localhost:22 -L19922:HostA:22 HostA if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] ; then echo Tunnel to HostA created successfully else echo An error occurred creating a tunnel to HostA. Return code: $? fi } /usr/bin/ssh -p 19922 localhost ls > /dev/null if [[ $? -ne 0 ]] ; then echo Creating new tunnel connection to HostA createTunnel fi

The meat of the script is in the createTunnel function, which creates the tunnel as described above. The canary tunnel is checked on line 9, and if the connection fails, a new tunnel is created.

Run this code in a cron job every few minutes, and that will take care of keeping the tunnel in place at all times.

Connecting

Now that HostB has the createTunnel code running periodically, it’s time to use it!

The simplest way is to simply chain multiple ssh commands together, as follows:

1 ssh -t HostA 'ssh localhost -p 10022'

The -t parameter is needed to allocate a pseudo-TTY to be allocated. Without it there won’t be any output.

Better still, if you install netcat on HostA, is to set up a ProxyCommand in your SSH config:

1 2 3 4 # ~/.ssh/config Host HostB ProxyCommand ssh -q HostA nc -q0 localhost 10022

Now you can simply run ssh HostB directly.

I’ve been running this code myself for several months and haven’t had any problems, but would love to hear from anyone else using something similar. Happy coding!