Port Forwarding Through the Looking Glass

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
– Lewis Carroll

My production servers reside behind a perimeter firewall in a data center. A minimal set of ports are open to the world, notably port 22 for sshd and port 80 for the Apache webservers which proxy requests to one of several Tomcat instances. The Tomcat ports are blocked at the data center’s perimeter firewall which means no direct access to Tomcat’s manager interfaces. But that’s OK, there are several options for reaching the Tomcat manager from outside the data center. I’ll glance over three options and then delve into a fourth option that is the gooey center of this posting.