Console Redirection
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Video Transcription
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>> Hello, Cybrarians. Welcome back to
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the Linux plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor, Rob Goelz.
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In today's lesson, we're going
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to discuss console redirection.
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Upon the completion of today's lesson,
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you are going to be able to understand
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the purpose of SSH port forwarding and
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explain how that port forwarding can be
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configured to allow for console redirection.
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Console redirection is actually covered by
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SSH port forwarding, so what is it?
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Well, SSH port forwarding
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is really just a way of creating
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a secure connection or a tunnel between two systems.
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It's going to allow you to redirect a connection from
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any network port to Port 22, which is the SSH port.
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It makes it possible for that data to
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flow through an encrypted SSH tunnel.
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There are a few pre-reqs however.
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Each side of the connection
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needs to have OpenSSH installed.
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But we can check that really easy with
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systemctl status sshd.
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Then the port forwarding actually has to be
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enabled in the configuration.
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If you go into the OpenSSH configuration file,
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you're going to want to set AllowTCPForwarding to yes.
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There are four different types of
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SSH port forwarding to know for
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the exam and we'll cover those in this lesson.
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The first type of port forwarding is local.
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This is SSH port forwarding from a local SSH client.
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It is done when you want to access
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a remote resource through an SSH tunnel.
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This is done via the -L for local option,
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>> that's an SSH option that we pass in.
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>> For example, ssh -L local port,
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destination server, remote port, and SSH server.
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We're going to look into this in a little
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more detail with an example here.
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In our example, what we're doing is ssh -L of 1337.
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That's the local port.
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We're going to remote system, someplace.com,
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>> and the remote port over there is port 80.
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>> We're going to be using the
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>> localhost as our SSH server,
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>> so really just ourselves.
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What we're doing here is the SSH
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client gets configured to use
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that port 1337 for local port forwarding.
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The client receives a connection on port 1337
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>> and then authenticates to the localhost,
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>> which is just the local SSH server.
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This is going to allow us to tunnel through to
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someplace.com on localhost port 1337.
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But someplace.com is going to return port 80,
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which we know is HTTP traffic.
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It's going to return that back through
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the localhost 1337 port.
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The result is that if we open a browser on our machine,
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on our localhost, and then go to
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the address localhost 1337,
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the browser then display the website, someplace.com.
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But for our system, it
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looks as though that port 80 traffic
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is coming through port 1337
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because of the tunneling we have configured.
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Now, the next example of port forwarding is what's
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called remote port forwarding,
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and that's when port forwarding starts at
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the remote host as opposed to a local SSH client.
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This is done when you want to give
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access to a local resource,
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or a resource on your local machine,
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>> or your server to a remote host
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>> and you want to set it up through an SSH tunnel.
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This is done using the -R option to SSH.
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So -R for remote and
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the example is ssh -R, remote port,
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the localhost of our local machine,
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the port we're going to open on our localhost,
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and then user@remote-SSH-server.
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We're going to see this in detail as
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well with an example.
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Here in our example, what we're doing is we're
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opening the remote port 1337.
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On the localhost, we're opening port 2049.
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Were putting in user at the remote SSH as our login.
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SSH is used to log in to user@remoteSSH,
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and the remote SSH client opens port 1337.
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From there, the connection is
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initiated back to our local system.
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The tunnel is opened up on the local port
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on our system as 2049.
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That 2049 is the port for NFS.
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Localhost 2049 will return
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back to the remote host on port 1337.
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Then the remote client can mount NFS shares on
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port 1337 through localhost.
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Now, the remote client can access
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NFS resources on a local server
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>> here through that tunnel.
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>> Now, another example of console redirection
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and forwarding is X11 forwarding.
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This is another setting
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>> we can do through SSH forwarding.
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>> It allows you to use a remote GUI component without
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having to connect using a remote desktop environment.
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If we have X11 on both sides,
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we can use this rather than having to spin up VNC,
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no machine, next RDP,
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or SPICE, or any of that kind of stuff.
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We just need to have a local display server running at
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our machine and be running in
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a GUI environment in order to use this.
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Once we have that setup,
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we have display servers on both sides,
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all we have to do is connect to
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>> the server using ssh -X.
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>> Now that we've connected to the server,
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we can launch any GUI program on the remote system,
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on the remote server in SSH.
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For example, we can bring up a browser on
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our machine using Firefox,
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because what it'll do is it'll redirect
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that display back to our system.
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It will display Firefox, the browser,
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>> as if we're running locally on our machine,
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>> because it will be running locally on our machine.
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It will look like it's running locally on our machine.
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It will open a window on
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our machine with Firefox running in it.
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But anything that we do in that web browser session is
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actually put back and run through the remote server.
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It looks as if it's running on our machine,
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but we're actually running commands and operating
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the browser through that remote machine.
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This is very helpful if you have
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a need to use a web browser on a remote resource.
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You can only hit a local web like a Wiki,
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or a SharePoint site, or what have you on that system.
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You can only do it from that local network.
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This is a way that you can get to it and see it in
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a browser without actually having
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to land on that machine with X RDP.
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With that, we'll move on to our very last type
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of console redirection we're going to talk about today,
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and that is VNC forwarding.
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This really just opens a VNC desktop environment
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on a remote server over an encrypted SSH tunnel.
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It works the exact same way
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that local port forwarding does.
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We're just going to use VNC ports.
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For example, if the local VNC port is 5901 and
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the remote desktop is displayed on
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the display 3 VNC port 5903,
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we would set this up using SSH -L, again,
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capital L, for local port 5901 on the localhost,
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and then the remote server is 5903.
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Then we put in our user@remote-server
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>> to connect to that VNC server.
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>> We're all set.
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>> But with that,
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>> we've reached the end of this lesson.
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In this lesson, we covered
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the purpose of console redirection.
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We also talked about how SSH forwarding
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and X11 and VNC can leverage SSH forwarding.
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Thanks so much for being here,
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>> and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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