SSH & Remote Administration

Instant SSH ProxyJumping for Multi-Hop Environments

🧩 The Challenge

Accessing internal servers buried behind a bastion host often requires tedious manual port forwarding or creating multi-stage nested SSH sessions. This manual approach is cumbersome and makes it difficult to manage complex network topologies.

💡 The Fix

Use the native ProxyJump directive to automatically route your connection through an intermediary host without needing local tunnels or manual login stages.

ssh -J user@bastion-host:22 user@target-internal-host

⚙️ Why It Works

The -J flag instructs the SSH client to establish a tunnel through the bastion host first, effectively handling the multi-hop handshake transparently in a single command.

🚀 Pro-Tip: You can make this permanent by adding ProxyJump bastion-host to the specific Host block in your ~/.ssh/config file.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/11/2026