How To Use More

• Publickey Authentication
• Hiding
• Automatic Hiding
• Automatic Connection
• Proxy Command
• Authentication with Agent
• Connecting without Shell

Publickey Authentication

Put your private key(s) (id_rsa or id_dsa for SSH2, identity for SSH1) into the same folder as your config file. If its public key is in authorized_keys in your server, you can use publickey auth.

Hiding

After the connection is established, you can hide PortForwarder dialog by clicking "Hide". That also puts PortForwarder icon in your taskbar status area. Double-clicking the icon shows PortForwarder dialog again. Right-clicking the icon shows a small popup menu.

Automatic Hiding

If you check "Automatically" before starting connection, PortForwarder dialog will hide itself automatically after the connection is established.

Automatic Connection

You can give PortForwarder "host" or "user@host" as a command-line option, like:

• PortForwarder my_server
• PortForwarder toh@my_server_v6

This way, you can select a host when starting PortForwarder.

Proxy Command

You can use "Proxy Command" to connect to the server. For a "Proxy Command", I would recommend "connect.c", which can be found at this site.

For connecting to the server using this, your config file should have a setting like:

Host some.outside.server
    ProxyCommand connect.exe -H your.proxy.host:8888 %h %p

This is an example for connecting via HTTP proxy. If you want use SOCKS server, replace "-H" by "-S".

Authentication with Agent

PortForwarder does not have an authentication agent for its own, but you can use "Pageant", PuTTY's ssh agent. That means you need to get pageant.exe from PuTTY's web site when you use authentication agent.

Probably, you also need to download puttygen.exe, for PortForwarder and PuTTY have different formats for SSH2 private keys (PortForwarder uses the same format as OpenSSH). puttygen.exe can handle both formats. When you want pageant.exe to handle your key in OpenSSH's format, you need to import your key to puttygen.exe and save it in PuTTY's format. See "Docs" page on PuTTY's web site for details.

Start pageant.exe and add your private key in PuTTY's format. After that, PortForwarder will not ask your passphrase when connecting to your server.

And also, you can enable forwarding of the authentication agent connection by setting "ForwardAgent" to "yes" in your configuration file.

Connecting without Shell

If the user has /sbin/nologin (or /bin/false) as a shell on a remote host, start PortForwarder with -N option. For example:

PortForwarder -N
PortForwrader -N hostname
PortForwrader -N user@hostname

With -N option, PortForwarder won't start a shell on a remote host. I assume creating shortcut of PortForwarder and adding -N option in the property dialog is the easiest way for this.