Dylan Semler <dylan.semler <at> gmail.com> writes: doesn't make any sense to me, but with the hostnames in place, I was unable to connect and getting "channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused." Hopefully you're having the same issue. Yes the original command in the first posting on this thread would only work provided machine B has access to a dns that can provide the ip for the machine name specified in the original port forwarding definition defined in the first ssh command. If there is no dns to do this on machine B then the ip has to be specified instead.