First off, I’ve posted this question to the SSH mailing lists. All you folks on the Straight Dope seem to post answers faster, so I thought I’d ask here as well just in case someone here can help. And if not, maybe at least some of you can make funny remarks about my stupid mistake and at least make me feel better.
I’ve got PCs that I take care of scattered around in various places that are physically quite remote from one another. For some of these, I’ve set up ssh servers that I can reach from my office when I need to remote administrate.
I was over at one site this afternoon, and didn’t get done with all that I had to do. I will have time tomorrow to do the work, but not to drive over. Knowing that, I connected that remote machine to my office system using PuTTy. The remote machine doesn’t have an ssh demon and I didn’t have time to install one and reconfigure the firewall.
I intended to set up a reverse port forwarding so that VNC would work from my office system to the remote machine. I screwed up the settings, and the port forwarding doesn’t work.
I know from experience that an ssh connection will survive an sshd restart, even if the sshd configuration changes.
What I need to know is this:
Is the anyway to have sshd automatically setup port forwarding? This would need to be something in a configuration file that I could change, and then send sshd a restart command.
Any ideas?