Depending on your setup and where you are deploying your solution, you may have to jump via multiple servers before you can get access to your internal server. This quick guide will help you understand how you can leverage PUTTY to Proxy via multiple SSH hosts.

Here is the example: let’s say that you are in your house or outside your cloud provider and you need to access the private SSH server. That server has an IP address that is private, so it can't be accessed from the internet. There is only one server available from the internet. You can use that server as an SSH Proxy server to access the internal one via your SSH proxy server.

Here is what you need:

• Install the complete Putty suite, not just the putty.exe
• Have a Public Key configured on your servers and have the keys available

5 Steps to configure SSH Proxy with Putty

• Open Putty and create a new connection. Type the IP address or DNS Name of your Private SSH Server. On our Lab, that will be any IP address or Private DNS. Type a name to save the session later. Do not save it yet.
• Click the Connection → Data. Type the name in the Auto-login username field.
• Click Connection → Proxy. Type the IP Address or DNS server that is available externally or on the internet. Click "Local" for the Proxy Type and change the port to 22. Type your username that will be used to connect to the remote server. In the Telnet command or local proxy command field, type: plink %user@%proxyhost -nc %host:%port
• Click Connection → SSH → Auth. Click "Allow agent forwarding" and then put your public key.
• Go back up to the Session screen and click Save. Then, click Open.

That's it. You are now connected to your Private IP server via a public SSH Server.

Let me know how you use this tutorial.