Serve behind a virtual network

Question

I want to run a http server from a computer that is inside a virtual network to the outside world. I don't have any access to the gateway so cannot configure that. I was thinking that there could be a server outside my network that would work as a proxy for my server. I would make an outbound connection from my computer to this server proxy, and once this connection made every request to the server proxy would be directed to some port in my computer.

Is there something that provides this service? There were several times that I have been in this sit

Answer 1

SSH has the ability to do what you want. From inside your "virtual" network, you could create an SSH tunnel to the publically-accessible server with a command line like:

ssh -R ':8080:localhost:80' server.example.com

For this to work, server.example.com needs to be running sshd, obviously. Also, the server's sshd_config needs to set GatewayPorts yes, otherwise any tunnel you create will bind only to the server's loopback address, which will be not accessible by remote clients. (The default setting for GatewayPorts is no.)

In the above example, connection attempts to TCP port 8080 on the server will be forwarded to port 80 on localhost.

Answer 2

You really need to talk to the Network and/or Host Server administrator about this. If for example you're in a corporate environment they might not be too happy with you if you did something like this.

That said, you could probably use an SSH Tunnel, though I don't know how practical that would end up being.