FastSSH.com – free SSH tunnelling account !

FastSSH.com is a provider for FreeSSH account, which can be use for secure tunneling account or to avoid from Firewall.

User has to select SSH account from a set of locations (refer to picture below), which has its own features and limited. (ie: some server offer protocol forwarding in UDP and TCP, while some impose limit on 500 connections/day).

fastssh-selection

Creating an account is as easy as filling the “Account Creation Form”, which does not require email. Account created through FastSSH is valid for SEVEN(7) days.

fastssh-selection-4

However, I personally do not use FastSSH as I’ve my own box, and relying on a 3rd party SSH provider for my tunneling needs would pose security concerns over sensitive data. You’ve been warned.

*FastSSH does not offer UNIX shell, instead it only offers SSH tunneling service. See Simple SSH Tunelling Tips and SSH port forwarding in Microsoft Windows for more information on SSH tunelling

Simple SSH Tunnelling tips

SSH tunelling is usually used to avoid firewall restriction or to ensure point-to-point encrypted communication.

For example, if you want to send email to smtp server “smtp.yourserver.com” on port 587, but your organization currently blocking smtp port 25 and 587, then you can benefit from SSH tunelling to avoid from being blocked.

To get around that, you need an intermediate server, fastssh.com currently provide SSH tunneling service with 7days trial account.

Simple SSH tunnelling command, if you’re using fastssh.com service.

ssh -f fastssh.com-username@sg.fastssh.com -L 2000:smtp.yourserver.com:587 -N

So in your mail setting, you can safely put, SMTP Server = “127.0.0.1”, SMTP port = “2000” in your setting, in order to automagically connect to “smtp.yourserver.com” port 587 without firewall restriction.

Please refer here, for port forwarding in Microsoft Windows environment using PuTTY

Solving SSH “channel 3: open failed: administratively prohibited” error when tunnelling

A couple of days ago, I’ve encountered this error when I was trying to create a SSH tunnel from my office LAN to a remote server.

After looking for a solution, I found out that the remote SSH server must add “PermitTunnel yes” line in “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” file.

To do that, you need to:

sudo echo "PermitTunnel yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
service sshd restart

The second line is used to restart the ssh service in order to enable the changes.