Auto start an SSH tunnel and keep alive

Hold on Cowboy

This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. It's likely dead, dying, or wildly inaccurate.

I have a program that needs to talk to another server, but to secure the traffic I’ve set up a port forwarding SSH tunnel. The only problem is that this tunnel needs to be kept alive and started when the server boots up. Here is how, using /etc/inittab

For the server you want to make connections from follow these instructions.

Open up /etc/inittab and insert this code somewhere near the bottom `

Keeps an SSH port forwarding connect between serverA <—> serverB for mysql 

sm:345:respawn:/usr/bin/ssh -N -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 -l admin 192.168.1.5 ` Let’s break it down

For those familiar with SSH, it should go without saying that you need to set up pre-shared keys to automatically log into the remote server

Did this help you out? It took me a few days to piece together all this information together, I hope this saves you some time (who knows, maybe the future me will be thankful I wrote this down). Let me know your thoughts. [email protected]