SSH Tunneling

Last week I managed to configure OpenSSH(1) on my Arch server at home, hostname bluebeetle, to act as a SOCKS(2) tunnel so I could do a little more secure browsing when I'm at school, I used a Bash function(3) to launch the bound proxy in chromium on my laptop, hostname WhiskeyJack. This week I got a profile set up on my W7 box, hostname The-Mage, in PuTTY to connect through the SOCKS tunnel. While I was doing that I had the idea of seeing if I could use the tunnel to not only redirect my HTTP traffic through the tunnel but also if I could use the tunnel to connect low-level to the PostgreSQL server running on bluebeetle. After much tinkering around and a little goggling, plus a couple brain farts, I got the tunnel set up properly and I got the pgsql program I was writing to connect. Hint: it took longer than I care to admit that I should have changed bluebeetle's address in the source code from it's LAN address to 'localhost' since the tunnel was doing the routing not my router.