Setup a vpn server with a static IP with NAT and port forwarding

Question

I have a Debian VPS with an assigned static IP. I want to setup a virtual interface (with an ip like 192.168..) on my laptop (Ubuntu, dynamic IP) linked to the remote VPS, so that if I bind sockets to it the traffic is tunneled to the VPS and sent to the Internet from there. Port forwarding must be available.

This looks like a job for a VPN software, but I'm clueless about the pieces of software needed. Any advice?

Answer 1

You can do some of this just with ssh. It depends on your client, but the command line version goes as follows, and putty and other ssh clients have the facility to do this.

First approach is called dynamic port forwarding, and effectively turns your ssh session into a socks proxy.

On your local machine, do something like:

ssh -D8080 user@debianvpsip

In your browser, or any other socks proxy aware software, you can set the proxy server to be 127.0.0.1:8080, and any traffic sent to this port will go out to the internet as if originating from your vps.

The second approach, if you wanted to target a specific destination, you can use local port forwarding:

ssh -L1234:remoteip:80 user@debianvpsip

This creates a local port 127.0.0.1:1234 and any traffic sent to this port will be forwarded to remoteip:80

In both cases the traffic will appear to originate from your Debian VPS.