Create an SSH Tunnel from Windows XP / Vista to UNIX for Use with Beyond Compare

Bitvise Tunnelier – SSH2 Client

Bitvise Tunnelier is a free SSH and SFTP client for Windows which incorporates one of the most graphical SFTP clients out there, state-of-the-art terminal emulation with support for bvterm, xterm and vt100 protocols, support for corporation-wide single sign-on using SSPI (GSSAPI) Kerberos 5 and NTLM user authentication as well as Kerberos 5 host authentication, support for RSA and DSA public key authentication with comprehensive keypair management, powerful SSH port forwarding capabilities including dynamic forwarding through integrated SOCKS and HTTPS CONNECT proxy, powerful command-line parameters which make Tunnelier highly customizable and suitable for use in specific situations and controlled environments, contains an advanced scriptable command-line SFTP client (sftpc), a scriptable command-line remote execution client (sexec) and a command-line terminal emulation (stermc), an FTP-to-SFTP bridge allowing you to connect to an SFTP server using legacy FTP applications, WinSSHD remote administration features and single-click Remote Desktop forwarding…..whew that’s a lot of features and that is taken straight from their web site and I can attest that this is a very powerful tool and opens up Windows clients to the Unix World.

In addition to the above features it also includes Graphical SFTP Files Transfers and Terminal Access via Remote Console as well as single sign-on integration.

I initially was looking for a way to use Beyond Compare to compare PeopleSoft Tools Windows directories to my Unix Server’s PeopleTools directories. Normally this work be no big deal but our Unix Servers do not permit legacy FTP access, they only support SFTP and since Beyond Compare does not yet have that capability I had to search for a way to make it work.

What I found was Bitvise Tunnelier software and it allowed me to use Beyond Compare as described above to compare my Windows Source directories to my Unix Source directories. I accomplished this by use Bitvise Tunnelier to create a tunnel SSH connection to the Unix Server and then point Beyond Compare to this tunnel.

I’m going to attempt to describe how to download, install and configure Bitvise Tunnelier to accomplish this. If you decide you do not have a need to use Beyond Compare for this purpose there may be a similar type of operation that currently doesn’t work for you because it doesn’t have SSH capability but if you look at using Bitvise Tunnelier you may be able to add this feature to that tool enabling you to extend that software’s lifecycle and you may see other features such as the SSH Client and SFTP CIient that far exceed your present tools capabilities.

Bitvise Tunnelier – Web Site

www.bitvise.com – they offer several products and please note that Tunnelier is free for individual use only!

Download Area

http://www.bitvise.com/download-area

Please note that you need to read and agree to the terms which are available via the hyperlink on download-area page. You need to read and agree to the terms of the software before proceeding with the download.

Once you have read and agreed to the terms, click on the hyper-link to download the software and then install it. I am not going to document the installation process, its Windows software and as such it is very straight forward.

I’ve also placed a copy of the latest version (at the time I wrote this post, version 4.26) on the Y Drive in the location for the client install software.

BitVise Tunnelier – SSH2 Client – Create Profiles

This software uses profiles to connect to remote hosts. In order to set up a tunnel you need to create a profile with the information required to connect to the remote host. In this example the remote host is HP-UX 11i v2 Itanium Blade.

The first image is of the Tunnelier’s Login tab. You’ll see in the left pane the options: Load Profile, Save Profile, Save Profile As and Close Profile.

I filled in the information previous into a profile and named it tdpfap02 and saved in a directory that contains all of my SSH related files. The bottom half of this tab contains a log box where the various software commands are logged along with their result.

The next screen represents the Options tab. On this tab you specify the Reconnection option, whether or not to Open a Terminal session as well as an SFTP session. If you just want to create a tunnel you can unselect Open Terminal and Open SFTP. I choose the option to automatically reconnect if the connection breaks after successfully being established. If you do not want to enable this feature just don’t select and pick Never reconnect automatically instead. The other options on this tab instruct the software whether or not to display the user authentication banner and to logout when the session activity comes to an end.

The next tab is for the Terminal Emulation, you select the type of Terminal Environment you want to use and the last section is for the Remote Desktop settings. You’ll see I’ve select 127.0.0.1 for Target Host and the Target Port is 3389.

The next tab is for the SFTP settings. This tab contains options for Local and Upload Settings, Remote and Download Settings as well as features such as auto refresh of the folders, Upload Mode and Download Mode. You can also specify the initial local directory as well as the initial remote directory.

The next tab is for the Services options. This is the tab you are interested in when you want to set up and establish a tunnel between your Windows machine and the remote Unix server. The section – SOCKS/HTTP Proxy Forwarding – you want to enable this feature, you specify 127.0.0.1 as the Interface to Listen on (this is the IP address of your workstation, the loopback address actually) and the Server Bind Interface is left set to 0.0.0.0. The right portion of the screen is for the – FTP-to-SFTP Bridge – settings where you enabled this feature and set the Listen Interface to 127.0.0.1 and the Listen Port to 21 and make sure the SFTP Newline is set to Automatic. This last feature will handle any cr/lf (line termination) conversions on the fly.

The next tab C2SFwding you do not need to do anything with.

The same is true for the next tab S2CFwding.

The last tab before the final tab About, is the SSH tab. On this tab you specify the encryption options, whether or not to use Compression (zlib), the DH Key Exchange, the MAC key exchange, Host Key algorithms and whether or not to use Keep-Alive and to Start Re-Exchange. You can leave the defaults set as they are as they will work for you 80% of the time if not more. I choose Keep-Alive to sustain connections, in the event a tunnel is inactive for a long period of time if you do not select this option then most likely you will have to re-establish the tunnel because it will time-out and become dead. The Start Re-Exchange is to initiate the exchange of keys again in the event the connection has timed out and is attempting to re-establish itself.

The last tab is the About tab and contains the license information as well as the URLs regarding licensing, support, etc.

Now that you have entered all of the information in you will want to save this information as a profile so it can be used again at another time. Personally, I try to name my profiles so they contain the host and username because it gives me a way to associate a profile with a specific host and user account.

Once you have the profile saved, click on the Login button and as long as you have entered in the information correctly you will be connected to the remote host. If you selected the same options as I have on the preceeding screenshots once you’ve connected you’ll have a Terminal Session, an SFTP explorer session and the tunnel will have been established.

Now we ready to bring up Beyond Compare:

You have to use the format: ftp://127.0.0.1/ – for the remote server you established the tunnel with. Then the rest of the path information is relative to the Unix home directory of the user you used to authenticate to the remote Unix server with. In this example, the remote user is psoft and we use /usr/local/psoft at the common base for all of our PeopleSoft Environments.

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