Using SSH tunnels with Windows

The other day I was finally able to get an ssh tunnel working that wrapped my remote desktop connection. Why bother with that you might ask, since the RDP is already secure with RC4? Well, because you can wrap your entire session in to ssh, ftp, telnet, or any other plain-text setup.

The trouble I initially had with the free SSH solution was configuring puTTy. Instead of choosing an arbritrary local port to run the remote desktop from, I was attempting to choose the default port of 3389. Duh, can't open two sides of a port to the same machine and expect to talk to another machine! So if you follow these two links, you too can have your very own SSH tunnel between two windows boxes:

http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html
http://theillustratednetwork.mvps.org/Ssh/RemoteDesktopSSH.html

What you will be doing is installing Cygwin with ssh support on your host/server windows box (Or linux machine if that is what is desired, not for remote desktop then but vnc). Cygwin is a linux-like operating system that runs directly on top of windows. For the ssh client on the host machine, you can either setup another Cygwin setup, or use putty (at the above link). I say use puTTy unless you need to have ssh access to that machine. Putty is about 300KB, very small.