SocketShifter - Redirect Sockets on Windows

A trick I've often used to get around firewalls is ssh port forwarding. Basically, after SSH connects to a server, you can get it to forward local ports through the tunnel to arbitrary ports on the other end.

So, if I connect from work to my ssh server listening on my home router, I can forward my local port 1000 (which isn't being used) to port 80 on one of my internal machines, and connect to that webserver via http://localhost:1000.

Windows servers don't have many good options for an ssh server. The only one I've used was the version that comes with Cygwin, and it wasn't really all that good (hangs, crashes, non-killable).

Introducing SocketShifter, an app that performs a similar magic, only on Windows.

But wait, there's more!

It uses something called the .NET Service Bus, an offering from Microsoft's Azure. This promises to allow two machines to connect, regardless of intermediate firewalls (and how do I prevent this?). It also means you have to sign up for an account in order to use it.

I'll be sticking with ssh, for now, but this service bus thing looks kind of interesting.