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

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
[email protected]

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.