macos - SSH -L connection successful, but localhost port forwarding not working "channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused"

Question

My lab runs RStudio on a server. A couple weeks ago, from my cousin's house, I successfully ssh'd into the server and pulled up the server-side RStudio through my local Firefox browser. Now when I try to access the server RStudio from home (via my own router), it doesn't work. I need help troubleshooting, and I'm guessing it's some problem on the router. I'm running Mac OSX 10.6.8. No idea what the university server's running, but I don't think it's a server-side problem.

Here's how it worked the first time I did it, at my cousin's house: first, I VPN into the university network; then I call SSH with port forwarding; then I open a Firefox browser, connect to my localhost port, and it opens up RStudio on the server side which I can access through my local browser window.

Here's the problem I'm having right now when I try to log-in from my home network:

I can make the VPN connection successfully. I can also set up SSH successfully with this command: ssh -v -L 8783:localhost:8783 myacct@server.com

Here are the last several lines of the verbose output from the successful ssh command:

debug1: Authentication succeeded (password).
debug1: Local connections to LOCALHOST:8783 forwarded to remote address localhost:8783
debug1: Local forwarding listening on 127.0.0.1 port 8783.
debug1: channel 0: new [port listener]
debug1: Local forwarding listening on ::1 port 8783.
debug1: channel 1: new [port listener]
debug1: channel 2: new [client-session]
debug1: Entering interactive session.
Last login: Mon Sep  2 04:02:40 2013 from vpnipaddress

So I think I'm still succeeding at the VPN and SSH stage (though I don't know why it says my last login was Sep 2 when I've logged in a few times since then).

Next, I open Firefox, and I type localhost:8783, and instead of getting an RStudio server app through my browser window, I get the following errors:

In the Firefox browser window, it says: Server not found, Firefox can't find the server at www.localhost.com, Check the address for typing errors etc.

In the terminal window, it says:

debug1: Connection to port 8783 forwarding to localhost port 8783 requested.
debug1: channel 3: new [direct-tcpip]
channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused
debug1: channel 3: free: direct-tcpip: listening port 8783 for localhost port 8783, connect from 127.0.0.1 port 50420, nchannels 4

I'm not sure what I've got wrong. I haven't changed anything on my laptop since my last successful connection. I'm on my own router (instead of my cousin's), so maybe I need to mess with the firewall? I already allowed ports 22 and 8783 to come through the firewall to my laptop (I'm not even sure I needed to do that though). Help?

Answer 1

ssh -v -L 8783:localhost:8783 myacct@server.com
...
channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused

When you connect to port 8783 on your local system, that connection is tunneled through your ssh link to the ssh server on server.com. From there, the ssh server makes TCP connection to localhost port 8783 and relays data between the tunneled connection and the connection to target of the tunnel.

The "connection refused" error is coming from the ssh server on server.com when it tries to make the TCP connection to the target of the tunnel. "Connection refused" means that a connection attempt was rejected. The simplest explanation for the rejection is that, on server.com, there's nothing listening for connections on localhost port 8783. In other words, the server software that you were trying to tunnel to isn't running, or else it is running but it's not listening on that port.