SSH -L connection successful, but localhost port forwarding not working "channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused"

My lab runs RStudio on a server. A couple weeks ago, from my cousin's house, I successfully ssh'd into the server and pulled up the server-side RStudio through my local Firefox browser. Now when I try to access the server RStudio from home (via my own router), it doesn't work. I need help troubleshooting, and I'm guessing it's some problem on the router. I'm running Mac OSX 10.6.8. No idea what the university server's running, but I don't think it's a server-side problem.

Here's how it worked the first time I did it, at my cousin's house: first, I VPN into the university network; then I call SSH with port forwarding; then I open a Firefox browser, connect to my localhost port, and it opens up RStudio on the server side which I can access through my local browser window.

Here's the problem I'm having right now when I try to log-in from my home network:

I can make the VPN connection successfully. I can also set up SSH successfully with this command: ssh -v -L 8783:localhost:8783 [email protected]

Here are the last several lines of the verbose output from the successful ssh command:

debug1: Authentication succeeded (password).
debug1: Local connections to LOCALHOST:8783 forwarded to remote address localhost:8783
debug1: Local forwarding listening on 127.0.0.1 port 8783.
debug1: channel 0: new [port listener]
debug1: Local forwarding listening on ::1 port 8783.
debug1: channel 1: new [port listener]
debug1: channel 2: new [client-session]
debug1: Entering interactive session.
Last login: Mon Sep  2 04:02:40 2013 from vpnipaddress

So I think I'm still succeeding at the VPN and SSH stage (though I don't know why it says my last login was Sep 2 when I've logged in a few times since then).

Next, I open Firefox, and I type localhost:8783, and instead of getting an RStudio server app through my browser window, I get the following errors:

In the Firefox browser window, it says: Server not found, Firefox can't find the server at www.localhost.com, Check the address for typing errors etc.

In the terminal window, it says:

debug1: Connection to port 8783 forwarding to localhost port 8783 requested.
debug1: channel 3: new [direct-tcpip]
channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused
debug1: channel 3: free: direct-tcpip: listening port 8783 for localhost port 8783, connect from 127.0.0.1 port 50420, nchannels 4

I'm not sure what I've got wrong. I haven't changed anything on my laptop since my last successful connection. I'm on my own router (instead of my cousin's), so maybe I need to mess with the firewall? I already allowed ports 22 and 8783 to come through the firewall to my laptop (I'm not even sure I needed to do that though). Help?

ssh -v -L 8783:localhost:8783 [email protected]
...
channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused

When you connect to port 8783 on your local system, that connection is tunneled through your ssh link to the ssh server on server.com. From there, the ssh server makes TCP connection to localhost port 8783 and relays data between the tunneled connection and the connection to target of the tunnel.

The "connection refused" error is coming from the ssh server on server.com when it tries to make the TCP connection to the target of the tunnel. "Connection refused" means that a connection attempt was rejected. The simplest explanation for the rejection is that, on server.com, there's nothing listening for connections on localhost port 8783. In other words, the server software that you were trying to tunnel to isn't running, or else it is running but it's not listening on that port.

Posting this to help someone.

Symptom:

channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused
debug1: channel 2: free: direct-tcpip:
   listening port 8890 for 169.254.76.1 port 8890,
   connect from ::1 port 52337 to ::1 port 8890, nchannels 8

My scenario; i had to use the remote server as a bastion host to connect elsewhere. Final Destination/Target: 169.254.76.1, port 8890. Through intermediary server with public ip: ec2-54-162-180-7.compute-1.amazonaws.com

SSH local port forwarding command:

ssh -i ~/keys/dev.tst -vnNT -L :8890:169.254.76.1:8890
glue@ec2-54-162-180-7.compute-1.amazonaws.com

What the problem was: There was no service bound on port 8890 in the target host. i had forgotten to start the service.

How did i trouble shoot:

SSH into bastion host and then do curl.

Hope this helps.

Note: localhost is the hostname for an address using the local (loopback) network interface, and 127.0.0.1 is its IP in the IPv4 network standard (it's ::1 in IPv6). 0.0.0.0 is the IPv4 standard "current network" IP address.

I experienced this error with a Docker setup. I had a Docker container running on an external server, and I'd (correctly) mapped its ports out as 127.0.0.1:9232:9232. By port-forwarding ssh remote -L 9232:127.0.0.1:9232, I'd expected to be able to communicate with the remote server's port 9232 as if it were my own local port.

It turned out that the Docker container was internally running its process on 127.0.0.1:9232 rather than 0.0.0.0:9232, and so even though I'd specified the container's port-mappings correctly, they weren't on the correct interface for being mapped out.

In my case, it worked after running the vncserver on linux.

1. Entered this on linux command line : sudo ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 -i <ssh_private_key> <username>@<public-IP-address>
2. Type there vncserver
3. Go to VncViewer application and connect using localhost:5901

I used to meet the similar problem because 'localhost' was not available on server when it restarted network service, e.g. 'ifdown -a' but followed by only 'ifup -eo1'. Besides server is not listening to the port, you can also check 'localhost' is available or not.

ps: Post it just hope someone who has the similar problem may benefit.

I had this problem when I wanted to make a vnc connection via a tunnel. But the vncserver was not running. I solved it by opening the channel on the remote machine with vncserver :3.

I had the same error when I was trying to tunnel my mlflow ui over ssh to view remotely. As mentioned in the first answer, the error arises because nothing on the server is listening for the port. This, for me, is because I forgot to start the mlflow app on my remote machine! So in general – make sure the app you're trying to access remotely is running.

In my case, it worked after checking the correct IP address of the user credentials previously I was using the wrong IP of the server

ssh -NfL 127.0.0.1:8084:127.0.0.1:8888 user@ip_address_of_server

after correcting it, works fine.

Encountered with the same error. In my case, I found the problem was in the config file of jupyter.

Let's say there are 3 computers named A, B, and C, and A can access B but can't access C; B can access C.

To access jupyter-notebook service of C from A, first I established ssh tunnel from A to C through B, then I access jupyter-notebook by typing localhost:port_number, then I got the error.

Finally the problem was solved by writing the "c.NotebookApp.ip = '0.0.0.0'" in jupyter-notebook's config file, where '0.0.0.0' allows the access of other IPs.

Hope someone in a similar situation may benefit.

Just replace localhost with 127.0.0.1.

(The answer is based on answers of other people on this page.)

This means the remote vm is not listening to current port i solved this by adding the port in the vm server