My SSH Setup Lately I’ve been heavily using two tricks that ...

2026-10-27T02:55:16Z

My SSH Setup

Lately I’ve been heavily using two tricks that have really improved my SSH’ing
experience: reverse port forwarding and a fileserver.
I do all of my work over ssh, and often find myself wishing that I could reach
from the ssh server through the client and pull files off of the host. Turns out
that’s relatively easy to accomplish.
I set up sshd on the client, and only allowed logins from localhost and key-based auth (probably overkill, but whatever).
Then when I ssh to the server, I add -R 22022:localhost:22, which forwards the client port localhost:22 to the server’s port 22022.
Then I copied the server’s public key and put it in my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
Now, from the server, I can do ssh localhost -p 22022 and get into the client, or use scp to have server initiated transfer of client files.
The other thing I often want is the ability to view files from the server
graphically on the client.
x-forwarding exists, but is painfully slow.
So, instead I use filebrowser quantum running on port 8000 serving everything under my home directory ONLY on 127.0.0.1.
This is the full config I use.
http:
port: 8000
baseURL: "/"
listen: "127.0.0.1"
server:
sources:
- path: "/home/aneesh"
config:
defaultEnabled: true
auth:
methods:
noauth: true
frontend:
name: "Earth Files"
Then, when I ssh from the client, I can specify -L 8000:localhost:8000 to be able to navigate and view server files through the client’s webbrowser.
To cope with my muscle memory of using xdg-open to open files, I have the
following fish snippet in my config:
if set -q SSH_CLIENT
function xdg-open
set -l cmd
for arg in $argv
set -l path (realpath --relative-to ~ $arg)
set cmd $cmd "DISPLAY=:0 firefox localhost:8000/files/aneesh/$path;"
end
ssh localhost -p 22022 -t "$cmd"
end
end
which opens up new tabs in firefox pointed at the files I wanted to look at.
Bonus: The alias I normally use to ssh to the server also has -t "tmux a || tmux" which automatically attaches to my last tmux session or creates a new one, solving the problem of ssh’ing in, running a long interactive command and then kicking yourself for not doing it in tmux when you want to disconnect.

https://aneeshdurg.github.io/posts/2026/10/26-myssh/

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My SSH Setup Lately I’ve been heavily using two tricks that ...