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How it works
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============
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sshuttle is not exactly a VPN, and not exactly port forwarding. It's kind
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of both, and kind of neither.
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It's like a VPN, since it can forward every port on an entire network, not
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just ports you specify. Conveniently, it lets you use the "real" IP
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addresses of each host rather than faking port numbers on localhost.
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On the other hand, the way it *works* is more like ssh port forwarding than
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a VPN. Normally, a VPN forwards your data one packet at a time, and
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doesn't care about individual connections; ie. it's "stateless" with respect
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to the traffic. sshuttle is the opposite of stateless; it tracks every
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single connection.
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You could compare sshuttle to something like the old `Slirp
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp>`_ program, which was a userspace TCP/IP
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implementation that did something similar. But it operated on a
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packet-by-packet basis on the client side, reassembling the packets on the
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server side. That worked okay back in the "real live serial port" days,
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because serial ports had predictable latency and buffering.
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But you can't safely just forward TCP packets over a TCP session (like ssh),
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because TCP's performance depends fundamentally on packet loss; it
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*must* experience packet loss in order to know when to slow down! At
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the same time, the outer TCP session (ssh, in this case) is a reliable
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transport, which means that what you forward through the tunnel *never*
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experiences packet loss. The ssh session itself experiences packet loss, of
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course, but TCP fixes it up and ssh (and thus you) never know the
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difference. But neither does your inner TCP session, and extremely screwy
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performance ensues.
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sshuttle assembles the TCP stream locally, multiplexes it statefully over
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an ssh session, and disassembles it back into packets at the other end. So
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it never ends up doing TCP-over-TCP. It's just data-over-TCP, which is
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safe.
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