Recently I had a situation where a combination of firewalls and load balancers prevented me from testing an application. Fortunately, an experienced server admin had a solution that I am sharing here: Use putty for port tunneling.

Create and save an SSH session for the host

Load the session, then go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels

Enter port and server info then click Add

Click Open
Return to the Sessions and Save to store for future use
Now you can access the remote machine:port by using localhost:port, i.e., http://localhost:8080 will take you to http://anyhostname:8080 in the above examples.

This can also be done with BitVise Tunnelier (shown below for accessing MySQL):

© Scott S. Nelson