Jtdylktuy

I have the following entry in my .ssh/config file:

Host myhost

    Hostname localhost

    User me

    ServerAliveInterval 30

    ProxyCommand ssh -q external-relay /usr/bin/nc -w 90 localhost 9889

Very simple, it allows me to access myhost from outside its NATed network, by bouncing off external-relay.

Most of the times I only want to SSH to myhost, without creating any SSH tunnels, but some other times I want to create various tunnels, for different purposes.

Nowadays I simply manually append the -L tunnel entries when I ssh to myhost but it's becoming increasingly difficult to remember which sets of ports I need for which purpose.

I could just add those custom port forwarding commands as aliases, but what I'd really like is to have separate named entries in my .ssh/config file that basically create the connection to myhost and add the required tunnels, but I don't want to duplicate the whole myhost config everytime, because if/when I change the external-relay, I don't want to have to remember to change it in every entry that used it.

Is there a way to create an entry that inherits fom the myhost entry, and simply appends the required LocalForward directives for that particular tunnel case?

You should be able to do:

Host myhost-*

    Hostname localhost

    User me

    ServerAliveInterval 30

    ProxyCommand ssh -q external-relay /usr/bin/nc -w 90 localhost 9889

followed by:

Host myhost-1

    LocalForward ...



Host myhost-2

    RemoteForward ...

:

myhots-1 and myhost-2 will derive settings from myhost-* (but CANNOT override them).

You definitely should have a look at the beginning of DESCRIPTION section (to see how options are applied to connection) and PATTERNS section of ssh_config man page.