I was talking with my coworkers this afternoon about Time Warner’s plans to jack up rates for high-bandwith users and it got me thinking about how much of their precious bandwith I am actually using.  I know that my router at home has a web browser interface where I can get that information, but I have it intentionally only allowing access from the local area network interfaces.  I needed to find another way to view the site from work while making the router think that I was on the right network.  What I ended up doing was using PuTTY to create a SSH tunnel from my work computer to my Linux box on the home network.  I then just pointed my browser at the forwarded port on my work computer and up comes my router’s web interface.  Who needs VPN when you have PuTTY?  Anyway, here are the exact steps that I took to do this:

  1. Start PuTTY
  2. Under Connection->SSH->Tunnels specify a source port (the localhost port you want to connect to) and a destination (IP:port) that you want to connect to on your home network.
    • Source port: 8008
    • Destination: 192.168.0.1:80 (or whatever IP your router is at and it’s web interface port)
  3. Click “Add”
  4. Under “Session” specify the host name for your SSH server that lives on your internal network, but is exposed via port forwarding on your router with port 22.
  5. Click “Open”
  6. When prompted, enter your username and password for your SSH server.
  7. Now just pull up your favorite web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8008.  You should see the page just like you would if you were sitting at home.