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Reverse SSH tunnel for Bitcoin Core daemon

If your Bitcoin Core daemon runs behind NAT and your ISP doesn't provide a public IP address, you may run it as a Tor hidden service to make it publicly available. However, that might not be sufficient for some use cases and thus a reverse SSH tunnel might come handy.

Prerequisites

  • Bitcoin Core daemon running on a Linux machine behind NAT.
    • Let's call the machine node.
  • A server with public IP address you have full access to.
    • Let's call the server vps.

Instructions

vps

  1. Create system user bitcoin if not already present.
  2. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
    • Allow remote hosts to forwarded ports by setting GatewayPorts option to yes.
    • Append bitcoin user to AllowUsers if you already use this option.
  3. Restart SSH daemon for changes to take effect: 
    $ sudo systemctl restart sshd.service
  4. Open TCP port 8333 in your firewall.

node

  1. Install autossh if not already present.
  2. Use ssh-keygen to generate SSH key for user bitcoin.
  3. Append the following snippet to /home/bitcoin/.ssh/config: 
    Host vps
  HostName #FIXME
  RemoteForward 8333 localhost:8333
  ServerAliveInterval 30
  ServerAliveCountMax 3
    Replace #FIXME with the IP address of your vps.
  4. Use ssh-copy-id to copy generated SSH key to vps.
  5. Copy bitcoind-tunnel.service to /etc/systemd/system/bitcoind-tunnel.service
  6. Reload systemd services: 
    $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  7. Start the service and enable it at startup: 
    $ sudo systemctl start bitcoind-tunnel.service
$ sudo systemctl enable bitcoind-tunnel.service

That's it, your node is publicly available! You may check it via bitnodes.io.

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