mobiletunnel

A reconnecting tcp tunnel with stream multiplexing. Typical use case is to have an ssh port forward which persists over network changes.

Usage

The easiest way to use mobiletunnel is with --copy-self, which automatically copies the binary to the remote machine over SCP and runs it — no manual server installation required:

cargo run --release --bin mobiletunnel -- \
    --copy-self \
    --local-port 8022 \
    --target-host myserver.example.com \
    --target-port 22

This will:

1. SCP the mobiletunnel binary to the remote machine (into /tmp/ by default)
2. SSH to the remote and start the server component as a daemon
3. Set up a local SSH port forward to the server
4. Run the client, which connects through the forward

Now you can ssh -p 8022 localhost and the connection will survive network changes.

Options:

• --copy-self-base /path/ — remote directory to copy the binary to (default: /tmp/)
• --ssh-base "ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykey" — custom SSH command
• --scp-base "scp -i ~/.ssh/mykey" — custom SCP command

Without --copy-self, you need to install mobiletunnel_server on the remote manually and point to it with --server-command.

Building

All builds produce fully static musl binaries with no glibc dependency, runnable on any Linux. This is required for --copy-self to work — the binary copied to the remote must not depend on the remote's glibc version. Requires the musl target:

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Then:

cargo build            # debug build
cargo build --release  # release build (required for --copy-self)

Security

• Everything is local user priveledge
• No crypto is done in app, it is all handled by the ssh tunnel