I am a complete beginner when it comes to networking and I am trying to set up a TCP tunnel on my machine using pagekite. I want to route all traffic from a TCP address to a port on my localhost, let's say 8080. I would then start a handler on localhost:8080 to deal with the incoming traffic. I can get this to work with ngrok simply by doing ngrok tcp 8080, but on a free ngrok plan I cannot reserve tcp addresses and ngrok is rather slow, so I opted to try and use pagekite.
Pagekite normally allows easy tunnelling to an HTTP address, but they have a guide here about how to use PuTTY along with Pagekite to create a TCP tunnel proxied by HTTP.
I followed their guide but could use some help figuring out if it does what I want it to do.
I am working on a Linux VM, so I first set up an SSH server with openssh like this: sudo service ssh start
I then exposed that SSH server using pagekite like this: python3 pagekite.py 22 ssh:user.pagekite.me
I then started PuTTY, and configured the Host Name to be user.pagekite.me on port 22, setup an HTTP proxy with the proxy hostname user.pagekite.me on port 443 and finally created a tunnel from the PuTTY machine with source port 8080 and destination localhost:8080.
Now I am not sure what this actually accomplished. I know that the PuTTY machine connected to the ssh server running on my VM and I am able to use the linux terminal from the PuTTY terminal but has this actually created a TCP tunnel from user.pagekite.me:8080 to localhost:8080? Additionally after doing this, if I try to setup the handler on localhost:8080 I get the following error:
Handler failed to bind to 0.0.0.0:8080
Rex::BindFailed The address is already in use or unavailable: (0.0.0.0:8080).
Again I am completely clueless when it comes to networking so if anyone could explain what it is I'm doing and if it is even possible to do what I want the way that I am doing it, that would be quite helpful.
