My ISP started to roll out broken IPv6 for home users, so my services aren’t available from outside anymore. I don’t need a full vpn solution, but sometimes I just want to ssh home to check a file etc. The simplest solution was to create a reverse ssh tunnel. The raspberry pi inside my home network connects to my public server via ssh. Logged in on the server I can connect to a local port and get forwarded to the raspberry. That works for me really well.

Since wifi is a little bit flaky, I need to make sure, that the ssh connection is reopened when there is a connection loss. You can write a very simple script like this and use a cronjob to execute it.

#!/bin/bash

COUNT=$(ps ax | grep 'ssh -Nf -R' | wc -l)

if [ $COUNT -eq 1 ]
then
    echo "No tunnel yet. Creating..."
    ssh -Nf -R LOCALPORT:localhost:PORT user@remote
else
    echo "Tunnel already exists. Aborting."
fi

But I just found out about autossh. Which does the monitoring for you. I tried to get it working with systemd, but without any success. Ideas are welcome.

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/autossh-tunnel.service
[Unit]
Description=reverse ssh tunnel
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=localuser
ExecStart=/usr/bin/autossh -f -M 0 remote -l remoteuser -N -o "ServerliveInterval 60" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -R LOCALPORT:localhost:PORT
ExecStop=/usr/bin/pkill autossh
Restart=always

$ sudo systemctl enable autossh-tunnel.service
$ systemctl start autossh-tunnel.service

Looking at journalctl, I can see the exit but no reason. Executing the command manually works fine.

systemd[1]: Starting reverse ssh tunnel...
systemd[1]: Started reverse ssh tunnel.
autossh[2468]: port set to 0, monitoring disabled
autossh[2474]: starting ssh (count 1)
ssh child pid is 2476
received signal to exit (15)

In the end I modified the bash script to use autossh.

#!/bin/bash

COUNT=$(ps ax | grep 'autossh' | wc -l)

if [ $COUNT -eq 1 ]
then
  echo "No tunnel yet. Creating..."
  /usr/bin/autossh -f -M 0 remote -l remoteuser -N -o "ServerliveInterval 60" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -R LOCALPORT:localhost:PORT
else
  echo "Tunnel already exists. Aborting."
fi

If you have a better solution, let me know.