Clearly, this is no way to run a production service, but sometimes it's useful during development to run some services off-site where you have more opportunities to control and monitor application behavior. In my case, I simply did not have enough resources on my VPS to host my database, but I wanted to test things before upgrading. There was just one tiny snag: my home server is behind a NAT that I don't have any control over, and my VPS does not support IPv6 for NAT traversal purposes. What now?

The problem boils down to this: my database runs at home:5984, I want it to be available at vps, but home is behind a NAT. The most notable solutions are:

• use a VPN
• use a SSH tunnel

SSH is easiest for mapping a single service, and I'd encourage you to look into reverse-tunneling if it fits your use case. A single command from home does the trick for me:

Also, here's the requisite screenshot as I index all my data...


Incidentally, the reason I can't use a VPN is the same reason I couldn't use IPv6: no tun/tap support in my VPS. There is clearly a performance issue preventing this from being a production-quality solution: the 3Mbps pipe between the two servers really can't compete against a local/loopback connection.

Yes; it doesn't work because the VPS doesn't do TUN/TAP. On the other hand, using IPv6 for NAT traversal does not perform very well at all, so I preferred the reverse tunnel.

I forgot to mention that SSH is also a little bit more secure