I have ddwrt on my router back home and I'm playing with ssh on my laptop from a remote location to better understand ssh.
My router has port 5000 listening for incoming ssh which it port forwards to the ssh dropbear server in ddwrt.
So on my laptop, away from home. in a terminal, I type:
ssh -L 1081:www.whatsmyip.org:80 root@martinxyz.duckdns.org -p 5000
and, after the ssh sessions starts, I open a browser and type:
http://localhost:1081
It takes me to whatsmyip where my address is not the address of my router back home but that of the network my laptop is on.
Now if I set up dynamic forwarding:
ssh -D 1081 root@martinxyz.duckdns.org -p 5000
and set up the SOCKS proxy in firefox to listen on 1081, then when I open my browser and go to whatsmyip, it sees the IP address of my router back home
I can appreciate why dynamic forwarding makes my IP address appear as that of the end of the ssh tunnel at my router, as the unencrypted traffic pops out, and that reassures me that there is an ssh tunnel between me and my router back home. So that's why I was surprised that local port forwarding behaves differently in that respect because there is still an ssh tunnel between me and my router.
I'd really appreciate properly understanding why this is so and perhaps then yet another piece of the ssh jigsaw will fall into place for me. And if it's down to the SOCKS proxy that wouldn't surprise me because, despite all my reading up on it, I am only marginally clearer what that's all about.
