I've been using ssh tunnels for a while now. I first encountered the technique when setting up my e-mail client when doing research at the ISI. The ISI are understandably quite security conscious, so a ssh tunnel was required to access my mail on my mac. I'll admit that I set this up initially withot really having a clue, simply following the directions of the guys at the ISI that knew what they were doing. I had a couple of ssh commands sitting in an e-mail (and more often than not in my history), which I would simply refer to and reuse.

More recently at Ephox I've been doing a fair bit of ssh tunneling. I've been doing this to access the UK demo server for E2, exposing the Websphere admin and wcm portal urls via the tunnels. This process has worked relatively well for a couple of weeks for me, but in my current stage I'm going through some pain as the transfer of my ear file from the local build to the remote server is taking between 15 and 20 minutes currently. To get around this for some rapid bug fixing work, I've entered the next stage of my ssh tunneling jujitsu

• ssh to remote server
• ssh back to local Brisbane office, setting up a tunnel into subversion server
• then use subversion to check out the codebase.

After having performed this setup work, I can easily do my changes on my local box, update the remote server via svn, then build and deploy from the remote server. The build and deploy are currently too manual, and could use some automation, but I'm currently happy to wear the pain, and drop my deploy process from 20 minutes to under five.  

My current next step is to automate the rest of the process.  Assuming my recent foray into sysadmin land didn't completely kill the server, this should be done very soon.