[Health] SSH tunneling for secure remote GNU Health admin (a.k.a. no VPN, pleeeze!)

[Christoph H. Larsen]

Dear All,

Safe remote admin access for GNU Health is an important issue, as remote
help and assistance may be required at times. I am no big fan of
password, only, secured public access, and we do not yet have
certificate-secured access easily available for GNU Health.
What I do for contraptions like phpPgAdmin and friends is that I simple
deploy an SSH tunnel. I tried the same for the Tryton client, issued on
my local (remote) Linux workstation - something along the lines of:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_[ssh_user_name] -L 8001:127.0.0.1:8000 -N -t -v -x
address@hidden

All is fine to the ponit I am prompted to enter the certificate's
password. I then get:
---
debug1: Authentication succeeded (publickey).
Authenticated to dkgmdc.com ([121.100.52.138]:667).
debug1: Local connections to LOCALHOST:8001 forwarded to remote address
127.0.0.1:8000
debug1: Local forwarding listening on ::1 port 8001.
debug1: channel 0: new [port listener]
debug1: Local forwarding listening on 127.0.0.1 port 8001.
debug1: channel 1: new [port listener]
debug1: Requesting address@hidden
debug1: Entering interactive session.
debug1: client_input_global_request: rtype address@hidden
want_reply 1
---
The last line is repeated over and over till timeout occurs.

This is what I get in the server's /var/log/auth.log:
---
Feb 21 21:07:13 hmis sshd[4219]: Accepted publickey for [ssh_user_name]
from 121.100.52.138 port 60013 ssh2
---
Not overly helpful, except that I managed to enter the right certificate
password ;).

I have zero problems using ssh (at the given port) to enter the server
via the secure shell, so the server's FreeBSD pf firewall should be
perfectly fine.

Any thoughts? I think it wolud be nicxe to be able to use ssh tunneling
for added remote administration security...

Cheers, and thanks a lot!

Chris

-- 
Dr. Christoph H. Larsen
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