You're quite right. Netcat is included in most unices (to get full bidirectional port forwarding, you would actually need two shell commands & a pipeline). Socat is quite a bit more versatile, and would do the forward in a single command. I think it's available by default in some unices, and should compile on nearly anything you're likely to encounter.
Netcat is of course also available as a Windows binary, although doing a bidirectional port forward is a bit trickier (does anyone know how to do the equivalent of mkfifo in Windows?). Cheers Mark On 11/24/06, Derek Martin wrote:
If I understand what you're asking, it's probably worth pointing out that it's already possible to do this kind of port redirection in general with TCP/IP without dealing with SSH's port redirection... there's not much you can do to prevent it. Anyone capable of writing socket code in C can write a program to redirect any port to anywhere in maybe a couple of dozen lines. ... Someone's probably already written a free program to do this kind of port redirection, which can be downloaded freely. It might even have pre-comiled binaries for your platform(s).>
