So a little more work with this. I found that SSH Tunnel Manager seems to stop working if the system goes to sleep (possibly something to do with the network socket being closed). Giving up on that, I started looking around for some of these “script to application” utilities I have been hearing about. ScriptGUI seems to work just fine: you take the text of a script, drop it into the editor window, save it and you end up with a double-clickable app. Uses a little more disk space đŸ˜‰
white:~/Desktop paul$ du -sk Secure\ Tunnel.app tunnel.sh
296 Secure Tunnel.app
4 tunnel.sh
This is the command line I ended up with. NB: your.internet.gateway is placeholder text and logging into it may require authentication each time. Read on for more.
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/ssh -N -v -p 22 -C -c 3des your.internet.gateway -L 8080/your.internet.gateway/3128 2>&1 > /dev/null &
The tunnel does shut down when the system goes to sleep/the network socket closes, but this makes it easy to rebuild it. SSH Tunnel Manager seemed to get hung up with that.
Background: I needed a double-clickable app for ease of use. I don’t want to make the Terminal a requirement. And as it turns out, the resulting application displays all the output of the script.
Additionally, you may want to set up ssh logins that skip password authentication to make this really seemless. I suppose you could create a special account for this on the server side, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
Now I feel a bit better about sending passwords and other details over the air.