1
Background
I am working on a project that involves 2 servers. Server A is a VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 with a public IP address. Server B is running a MJPG service on port 8080 and does not have a public IP address. I have created a reverse ssh tunnel between the two servers by running the following command on server B:
ssh <user>@serverA -N -R 8099:localhost:8080
Server A has apache running which serves a site with the following config (the default apache vhost)
<VirtualHost *:80>
# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that
# the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating
# redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName
# specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to
# match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this
# value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless.
# However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly.
#ServerName www.example.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
# Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
# error, crit, alert, emerg.
# It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
# modules, e.g.
#LogLevel info ssl:warn
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
# For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
# enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
# include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
# following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
# after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
#Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf
</VirtualHost>
I have modified the file found at /var/www/html/index.html
as follows:
<img width=640 height=480 src="http://localhost:8099/?action=stream"/>
The Problem
The above configuration is not working for me. The stream fails to load. I am able to execute the following command on server A and get a constant stream of data:
curl localhost:8099/?action=stream
But for some reason, apache will not serve the image.
If I edit /etc/ssh/sshd_conf
and add the line GatewayPorts yes
, I can get the stream to work by tweaking my image source to be http://<server_A_public_ip>:8099/?action=stream
however, this exposes the stream to the public.
I have also tried changing the User
and Group
directives in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
to match <user>
in the above ssh command so that apache is started as that user. But still no go.
I would like to be able to enable an ssh tunnel between serverA:8099 <=> serverB:8080, but have port 8099 only be accessible by server A itself. Nobody should be able to publicly access the stream via the url http://<server_A_public_ip>:8099
Is there anything obvious that I am missing out on here? Does anybody have any other ideas that could help me figure out what my problem is?