SSH local port forwarding ... Anycast Style
Frequently as I'm working on things at work, I need to access a remote website for a client as if I were the client. This means that I need to be ""inside their network to do so. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of being in their environment while sitting in my office.
To be able to do the testing that I need to diagnose problems, I use the technique I discuss in my SSH local port forwarding ... Anycast Style article. Doing this allows me to point my web browser at the name of the website, and connect to it's ""real name and IP (as reported via DNS or /etc/hosts). This means that I wont run in to problems with SSL certificates not matching the common name compared to the name that I'm pointing my web browser at.
Frequently I'm able to take a screen shot of my ability to access the web page as evidence that the back end systems are functional and that the problem I'm working on with others is indeed a network / load balancer issue. Thus allowing us to focus our efforts there rather than guessing as to what the possible problem could be. This technique can also be helpful when you have access to a system, but everything points to a load balancer IP address.
- See also:
- SSH LocalCommand