Assuming you have a Windows machine and you interact with Linux boxen at any stage, chances are high that you have used and interacted with PuTTY at one stage or another. That beautiful, less than 2 sec, 444K download of a tool (currently at version 0.60 beta) allows you to SSH, COM-direct, RSH, Telnet etc from the desktop. Both examples below relate to MySQL port tunneling.
SSH Tunnels using the Bash command line
Running on a proper machine (or even a Windows with Cygwin or a Mac Terminal) allows you to quickly tunnel a session to a remote server: (more…)