Yesterday, I needed to solve a pretty interesting problem. I had to move a few TB's of data from server A to server B in different countries and datacenters. Server A had a pretty decent connection, Server B had an awesome fast connection, but the connection between each other was unbelievably slow due to network routing issues within the route or one of the datacenters.
As the TB's of data mentioned above needed to be moved before a deadline in the near future, and I already contacted the hosts from both datacenters and they couldn't help me out, I had to solve it myself.
With some Googling and thinking through some options, I came with the idea of using a man-in-the-middle server (Server C).
Server A's connection to Server C was fast. Server B's connection to Server C was fast as well. The routing between Server A and Server B was just bugged!
As Server C was only used to pass data through, I used a simple dedicated server box with (pretty much) unmetered traffic from Kimsufi/OVH.
The solution I used is based on this StackOverflow post. I have used it for SSH access, SCP transfers and Rsync synchronization.
Ony one ssh tunnel is needed from Server A (to Server C).
First make sure Server C is properly configured for this:
Edit Server C's /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
AllowTcpForwarding yes
GatewayPorts yes
After that, do a restart of the ssh/sshd service.
From Server A:
ssh -N -R 0.0.0.0:8022:localhost:22 serverCUser@serverC
Now you can just connect from Server B onto Server A with:
ssh -p 8022 serverAUser@serverC
Additionally you may want to define some stuff in ~/.ssh/config:
Host gate.serverA
HostName serverC
Port 8022
HostKeyAlias serverA
This allows you to do the more coherent:
ssh serverAUser@gate.serverA
and at the same time not be bothered with server fingerprint mismatches.
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