Alternatives to SSH for tunnelling connections

Question

I'm currently using COPSSH to tunnel various connections to a remote Windows box and connecting using plink.exe from the PUTTY suite. After connecting directly, I've come to realise that the quality of connection using this setup is appalling. Tunnelled connections appear to get slower and slower. Can anyone recommend secure tunnel software that is more performant than my current setup?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '10 at 15:21

4

A UDP-based protocol will be more asynchronous than serializing over a tcp stream.

This should give OpenVPN better performance than OpenSSH on a lossy or high-latency network.

answered Jul 01 '10 at 15:21

Tobu

4,495

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '10 at 14:02

Two options that come to mind are stunnel (if you want something lightweight) and OpenVPN. Either should work just fine in windows, though I've never used either outside of a Linux/BSD environment, so I can't help out with any gotchas, recommendations, etc.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 01 '10 at 14:05

Stunnel (although I've only used it for connection encryption on MSWindows - on Linux running a tunnelled network connection runs like a clock).

I've heard good things about openvpn.

Do you need a tunnelled connection? i.e. have you considered IPSEC?

C.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '10 at 14:32

0

I've used both stunnel, and the putty family of tools (plink, putty), and I've only rarely found performance issues. I would imagine your slowness comes from poor network connection, or performance issues on either end of the pipe.

answered Jul 01 '10 at 14:32

John Weldon

413

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 22 '11 at 12:48

0

I find that plink.exe has much higher latency than Cygwin's ssh on windows. The difference is quite noticeable when using Synergy to share a keyboard and mouse.

answered Jul 22 '11 at 12:48

Marius Bjørnstad

1

Alternatives to SSH for tunnelling connections

5 Answers5