Putty tunnels

In a previous post, I was talking about getting a headless instance of Crashplan setup on an Ubuntu server and then administrating it from a local machine (in that case, Ubuntu). However, I needed to do a similar thing with a windows machine.

Get putty: the best (maybe only) SSH client worth having on Windows.

On the support page at Crashplan, there is some discussion about how to use putty to create the remote connection via a tunnel, but either I'm daft, or it's not quite explicit enough. So, here's a little reminder about creating tunnels using putty.

Make sure that the Crashplan desktop client is not open (the tray icon can continue to run in the background).

Change the config

• edit C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\conf\uk.properties
• uncomment the servicePort line and make sure it reads servicePort=4200
• save the file

NB. Have just found Notepad++ which is a great little replacement for notepad.

Create the tunnel

• open putty
• in the first screen, enter the server details (as you would if just SSHing normally)
• now in the left hand column, under "Connection" and then "SSH" is a tab helpfully titled "Tunnels"
• in the source port box, type 4200
• in the destination box, type localhost:4243
• click Add (don't forget to do this bit!)
• finally, click Open
• log in with your normal user credentials

Check that the port is open

• Start -> Run
• cmd
• telnet localhost 4200 (should not get a message that talks about failed connection)

Open Crashlpan - and you should get a remote connection over an SSH tunnel.

Once you're finished, change back the config file and close the putty session which will close the tunnel.