I am trying to forward web traffic from a remote server to my local machine in order to test out some API integration (tropo, paypal, etc). Basically, I'm trying to setup something similar to what tunnlr.com provides.

I've initiated the ssh tunnel with the command

$ssh –nNT –R :7777:localhost:5000 user@server

Then I can see that server has is now listening on port 7777 with

user@server:$netstat -ant | grep 7777

tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:7777          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     
tcp6       0      0 ::1:7777                :::*                    LISTEN  


$user@server:curl localhost:7777
Hello from local machine

So that works fine. The curl request is actually served from the local machine.

Now, how do I enable server.com:8888 to be routed through that tunnel?

I've tried using nginx like so:

upstream tunnel {
    server 0.0.0.0:7777;
}
server {
  listen 8888;
  server_name server.com;
  location / {
    access_log /var/log/nginx/tunnel-access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/tunnel-error.log;
    proxy_pass http://tunnel;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_redirect off;
  }
}

From the nginx error log I see:

[error] 11389#0: *1 connect() failed (111: Connection refused)

I've been looking at trying to use iptables, but haven't made any progress. iptables seems like a more elegant solution than running nginx just for tunneling. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!