A journey bourne of pure inconvenience...

Yesterday, I started thinking of how convenient it would be to ssh into my Ubuntu guest VM, containing all of Exploit-Exercises.com exploit exercises :-p for Nebula ,without actually working in the Virtualbox itself.

Secure Shell (SSH) allows me to setup a secure network for my data transfers. For these purposes I really just want to use ssh to remote login to my guest machine and execute commands remotely from my host machine.

So, this morning after a minute amount of googly searching, I downloaded Cygwin, and used it's setup.exe to install openssh tool.  I could have used Putty , another widely used SSH connectivity tool available for the $Free.99. Setting up openssh on my guest OS was pretty simple, too.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

While prepping my VM, I came across a sweet explanation of Network Address Translation here .
It definitely helped me understand some concepts. They had a sweet graphic explaining NAT and port forwarding.

Since my Ubuntu guest is already set up for NAT: "controls how the virtual adapter is connected to the real network of the host OS." When I set up my port forwarding rules, I am requesting that any ssh requests made to port 1989 from my host machine will be forwarded to port 22 of my guest machine. I had to use netstat to help decide which port number I could use in my port forwarding rules.

sudo netstat -anltp

And Viola! Let the SSH-ing begin!

ssh -p 1989 nebula@127.0.0.1