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remotemoe - ssh plumbing all the things

What is it

remotemoe is a software daemon for exposing ad-hoc services to the internet without having to deal with the regular network stuff such as configuring VPNs, changing firewalls, or adding port forwards.

Common use-cases include:

• Allow third-party services to access your web app while you're developing it.
• Let containers expose themself to the internet without having to change any infrastructure.
• Quickly share a web app with a collaborator or team for review.
• Allow your CI to run development branches that expose them-self for review.
• Access remotely deployed Raspberry Pi's.

remotemoe doesn't require its users to install, trust, or run any third-party software. It uses plain old SSH, which is available everywhere these days.

How it works

Users connect to remotemoe with their regular ssh client - they use the -R parameter to forward services which remotemoe then pass requests back to, from the public internet.

At its purest form, users open a shell to remotemoe, passing on their local port 80.

$ ssh -R 80:localhost:80 remote.moe

Once opened, other people will immediately be able to access your localhost:80 by accessing xyz.remote.moe as if it was on the public internet.

What it's not

It's no SaaS; if you need a reliable service, you're probably going to have to run it your self - any small cloud instance should do just fine...

Available for getting started and testing is remote.moe. It is provided with no guarantees and will run broken and unstable branches from time to time :)

Try remote.moe to get started

Use remote.moe if you are ready for a quick and dirty getting started experience. Assume you have a web server running on your local machine that listens for HTTP traffic on port 8080.

In a terminal, enter:

$ cd Pictures/; python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...

In another terminal, enter:

$ ssh -R80:localhost:8080 remote.moe
New to remotemoe? - try 'firsttime' or 'help' and start exploring!

http (80)
http://7k3j6g3h67l23j345wennkoc4a2223rhjkba22o77ihzdj3achwa.remote.moe/

$ 

That's pretty much all there is to it - all your nudes are now accessible on the URL that remotemoe spits out.

Next up is typing help to have a look at some of the other features. For instance, you could add a more human-friendly hostname, add HTTPS and SSH forwards, or look at the different ways to keep an ssh tunnel open.

Protocols

For convenience, remotemoe handles various types of protocols differently to make them easier to access:

HTTP

When typical HTTP ports are forwarded (80, 81, 3000, 8000 or 8080), remotemoe reverse proxies traffic from its HTTP server to the ssh tunnel.

Based on the incoming HTTP request's Host-header, it selects the appropriate ssh tunnel to use.

HTTPS

When typical HTTPS ports are forwarded (443, 3443, 4443, or 8443), just as HTTP, remotemoe picks an SSH tunnel to route traffic based on the Host-header.

HTTPS traffic, however, requires the forwarded service to talk TLS. It doesn't do any certificate validation as no-one will be able to provide a valid SSL certificate inside the SSH tunnel.

SSH

SSH does not support virtual hosts in the same manner as HTTP does, but there's a trick we can use: the -J ProxyJump parameter.

When typical SSH ports are forwarded (22, 2022 or 2222), remotemoe outputs a special ssh command which can reach the peer:

$ ssh -R22:localhost:22 remote.moe

ssh (22)
ssh -J remote.moe 7k3j6g3h67l23j345wennkoc4a2223rhjkba22o77ihzdj3achwa.remote.moe

$ 

ProxyJump'ing through remotemoe, allows it to see what host the client is trying to reach and just like HTTP(S) traffic, pick an appropriate tunnel pass communication on to.

By the way, ssh traffic is the most secure way of using remotemoe. You don't have to trust anyone but your remote endpoint. As long as you know your peers' fingerprint beforehand - there is no way remotemoe can intercept these ssh sessions even though they pass through it.

Other

remotemoe does not deal with any other protocols for now. But they are still available to use, however, not directly accessible without SSH.

You could for example access a forwarded SMTP service, that was forwarded with ssh -R25:localhost:25 remote.moe by doing something in the lines of:

$ ssh -L25:7k3j6g3h67l23j345wennkoc4a2223rhjkba22o77ihzdj3achwa.remote.moe:25 remote.moe 

Notice -L instead of -R - this pulls the remote service to your localhost, and the remote SMTP service should now be accessible from localhost:25.

Running remotemoe

You will need

• Some cloud instance, running ubuntu or similar
• ... that has a public IP address
• ... and a domain or subdomain with records appropriately configured
• Knowledge of Golang and general systems administration :)

To run remotemoe, you need to:

• Fetch this repo, build and move the executable to your instance or server
• Create a service for running remotemoe, take inspiration from infrastructure/remotemoe.service
• Ensure the hostname of the machine is set accordingly to your domain or subdomain.
• Move openssh out of the way, remotemoe wants to listen on port 22

This shall be automated in the future :)

Compared to Cloudflare's Argo Tunnels

Argo tunnels, and Cloudflare in general, do a lot of things that remotemoe does not, but one similarity is their trycloudflare.com service (https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-your-next-project/) where everyone can expose their web app through a tunnel.

Using their example, when using Argo tunnels, you are required to download their client and run:

$ cloudflared tunnel --url localhost:7000

a remotemoe equivalent would be:

$ ssh -R80:localhost:7000 remote.moe

remotemoe and especially Cloudflare does a lot more than this, but to highlight a few differences:

• Cloudflare provides a massive Highly Available service at a cost - remotemoe does not.
• Cloudflare requires you to create an account if you need to define hostnames or bring a custom domain - remotemoe does not.
• remotemoe can be used as an SSH ProxyJump-host and is not limited to any specific protocol - any TCP port is reachable through remotemoe.