É uma pratica muito comum fazer túneis com ssh para serviços da rede, este artigo o autor demonstra como fazer isto de forma rapida e facil com com portas do servidor smtp por exemplo.
Veja o trecho do artigo: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/449
The examples in this article assume that you reside behind a restrictive firewall which does not allow outgoing SMTP connections except to a designated mail server. You want to connect to a different mail server, mail.example.net, on port 25. You have an SSH account on a machine shell.example.org, which does not reside within the restrictive firewall and can thus access port 25 on mail.example.net.
With standard SSH port forwarding, you could enter the command:
ssh -L 2525:mail.example.net:25 shell.example.org
