Routing RDP over ssh tunnel

Question

I thought I could easyly find an answer here, but had no luck. Maybe it's just impossible: Suppose the following: I am sitting at starbucks with my win 8 laptop connected to their WLAN. I open up a ssh connection to my amazon ec2 micro ubuntu instance. Earlier in the morning before I left home, I openened up an other ssh connection to the same instance from my home win 8 machine. Now from my putty terminal I can see both connections pts/0 and pts/1 and netstat -n gives me the ip addresses of the two firewalls (starbucks and mine) with their 10000+ port numbers as well as my ubuntu server address with port 22. My ssh server on the ubuntu machine has TCPForwarding on.

Now how do I configure putty to tunnel rdp so I can access my home server? Do I have to do additional work on the ubuntu instance to forward the rdp packets?

win-laptop--->starbucks-firewall--->ec2-ubuntu-micro-instance<--my-firewall<--my-win-desktop

Thank you for your audience.

Answer 1

If your desktop and laptop were both running OS X / Linux / BSD, I'd suggest running this on your desktop:

autossh -R 127.0.0.1:3389:127.0.0.1:3389 your.ec2.instance

and this on your laptop:

ssh -L 127.0.0.1:3389:127.0.0.1:3389 your.ec2.instance

You'd then be able to open an rdp connection to localhost on your laptop, and it would be forwarded to your desktop. You shouldn't need to do any additional configuration on your ec2 instance. I'm assuming you don't have an RDP server running on your laptop.

So how do we do this using Putty? (I'm guessing slightly here.)

• select the "Connection → SSH → Tunnels" category in the left hand pane
• for "Source port" enter "3389"
• for "Destination" enter "127.0.0.1:3389"
• select "Local" (for the connection from your laptop) or "Remote" (for the connection from your desktop)
• click "Add"
• you will then want to save these details in the "Session" category

Ideally you will want the connection from your desktop to restart if it breaks for some reason. (If your home internet is anything like mine, it will glitch out and drop connections occasionally. But perhaps your home internet is more reliable than mine.)