Raspberry Pi SSH Proxy: How to Access Your Local Server from Outside the Network

In today's digital age, it's not uncommon for local servers to be hidden behind a network address translation (NAT) or a router with no public IP address. This can make it difficult to access your server from outside the network. One solution is to use a reverse SSH proxy on a Raspberry Pi.

In my case, the local server is a Raspberry Pi 4, but you can use any device that has a SSH client or a command-line interface (CLI) with SSH. Assuming your IP camera or web server doesn't have CLI access, I wanted to stream a video feed from an ESP32 cam that streams at :81/stream (there are many guides available on how to create a camera webserver on ESP32). You need a local server to launch the reverse tunnel.

The idea is represented in the simplified logical schema below:

So, how can you be reached from the outside world when you have no public IP address? Simple: use a reverse proxy to create a connection from anywhere to your local server. Our servers are sitting on LAN behind a NAT and we cannot be reached from the outside world; we cannot initiate a connection or call.

If your internet provider is like Hyperoptic, which uses a NAT, you're unable to use an IP address. In this case, there are programs that can help with that, one of them being SSH proxy. In general, there are two main settings: first, you open the port for traffic (usually port 80), then you forward that port to the server that needs to serve the request in your local network (with a local IP address).

There are several use cases:

* Case 1: You have no public IP address and want to access your local server from outside the network.

* Case 2: You have a dynamic public IP address but a fixed one. If your internet provider gives you a public IP address, then all you need to do is go to the settings of your router and change the configurations.

In this article, I will focus on Case 1, where you have no public IP address. There are about a zillion different options to achieve this, but let's complicate things and check some different situations you may face.

Raspberry pi ssh proxy