I'll mention it here, because I learned about it here.<p>"~C" will drop you into the SSH command line, allowing you to, among other things, effect port forwarding<p><pre><code> -L8080:localhost:443
</code></pre>
Learning that "~C" exists, and what you can do with it, has supercharged my use of SSH tunnels, which were already awesome on their own.<p>But for some reason this has been disabled by default in more recent ssh configurations... to ensure its available<p><pre><code> -o EnableEscapeCommandline=yes
</code></pre>
or, in your ~/.ssh/config<p><pre><code> EnableEscapeCommandline yes
</code></pre>
(edit: formatting)
Learning how SSH port forwarding is great as a pseudo-vpn for everything from GUI-client database access to (in physical infra) access to web-admin tools for appliances.<p>The socks proxy support can also deal with bad web filtering and privacy issues on public wifi networks (though nowadays if you're ssh'ing to a cloud IP, you'll get lots of "bot" restrictions).
When I see one of these with obvious AI tells at the top (sentences lacking a subject or verb), I ask myself:<p>Can’t I just open up a harness and prompt “Teach me how to do X?”
I do this all the time, I have a skill/gem with instructions on how I want to receive info, how to format and so on. Really helps to go fast to get the point.
I personally do this, ask claude code to teach me about concepts I don't know about when it codes something, and only then I accept what it suggests to me
The article mentions bastions, but no jumphosting?<p><pre><code> ssh -J user1@bastion1,user2@bastion2 targetuser@targethost</code></pre>
It is surprising how many times I see this content (this version might be marked “Published: Jun 19, 2026” but I've definitely seen those <i>exact</i> diagrams before, starting at least a few years ago, and the same content around them in many tutorials before that) without it being updated to mention jump-hosts.<p>Support was added to OpenSSH about a decade ago? Even on a low moving Linux distro like Debian/LTS everyone should have support by now.
There's a asymmetry here that "-R" works both for reverse static and dynamic (using SOCKS protocol) forwarding, but "-D" is required for dynamic forwarding which "-L" cannot do.<p>Why is that?
Or you could just install something like Tailscale and never have to think about it again.
As a sysadmin, one of your biggest ROI is learning the ins and outs of SSH.
It’s amazing what you can learn by reading the manual.
It is, because manuals are often not the best way to learn things. Most software manuals are reference manuals. SSH man page isn't too bad. I learned most of my SSH knowledge from it, but I'm not sure it's the best way to do it.