mjhjmtu

I am used to forwarding a remote service port on localhost using ssh like:

ssh -L 2181:localhost:2182 user@server
(forward remote host port 2182 to local port 2181)

now, from the machine I ssh to, I am trying to reach a tcp service and forward the response to my local machine:

local-machine:2181 <-- SSH --> remote-machine:2182 <-- netcat/named pipe --> service:2181

Note: I do not have direct access to the service machine, I only have access to the network through the machine I SSH to.

I was trying to use netcat with a named pipe:

On the remote-machine:

mkfifo fifo
nc -k -l 2182 <fifo | nc service 2181 >fifo

On local machine:
echo message | nc localhost 2181

but that doesn't seem to work.

I also tried, on remote-machine
nc -k -l 2182 0<fifo | nc service 2181 1>fifo

without luck

On the remote machine nc -k -l 2182 outputs the message I send from the local-machine:2181

if I simply pipe this like: nc -k -l 2182 | nc service 2181
I do see the response from the service on the remote-machine. So I'm able to go all the way to the service and back to the remote-machine but it stops there:

local-machine:2181 <-/- SSH --> remote-machine:2182 <-- netcat --> service:2181

so I don't understand why the named pipe won't forward the response through the ssh connection back to my local machine.

echo message | nc localhost 2182 on the remote-machine does NOT output anything back on the local-machine, so it's not making it through SSH for some reason.

Any idea why this is and how to fix it?

Thanks for help.

as pointed by @ysdx

the simple solution is:

ssh -L 2181:service:2182 user@server