On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Brian Wood <woodbrian77 at gmail.com> wrote: > Does anyone know of examples of on line services that use > tunneling? I've not found much. No, but I suspect that's due to the fact that learning the few command-line flags for tunneling is a bit higher learning curve than most people are willing to put up with. That said, ssh tunnelling is *immensely* useful for day-to-day development/sysadmin type activities. I use it exclusively to connect to our EC2 cluster, in lieu of a full-fledged VPN. It's fast, simple, reliable, and doesn't require any additional configuration on the server side of things. As an example of how I use ssh tunneling on a near-daily basis: Sequel Pro, a MySQL client for OSX, supports accessing the remote DB over an ssh tunnel. So all you need to do is give Sequel Pro the ssh server name, your username, and db credentials and Bob's your uncle. Instant secure, remote database access. Oh, I did think of one very popular service that leverages ssh tunnelling - github. When pushing commits to any repository on github, you're tunnelling git over ssh. -Erik P.S. I know this has been discussed on the list before, but it's useful enough to bear repeating: One more frequent use case is giving yourself a secure SOCKS-compatible proxy. This is very useful on public, untrusted networks to allow you to tunnel all of your browsing traffic through a secure tunnel. Assuming you have a linux server somewhere at your disposal, just run: $ ssh user at host -D8000 That will set up a dynamic (SOCKS) proxy on your localhost port 8000. Then in your browser settings, just configure it to use localhost:8000 as a proxy.