Today I was trying ssh tunneling between my desktop machine and a raspberry pi.  On the desktop machine I entered the following: ssh user@192.168.1.4 -L 3000:192.168.1.4:1234 I then gave it my password then started rtl_tcp : $ rtl_tcp -a 192.168.1.4 -p 1234 From my desktop machine I connected to 127.0.0.1:3000 and the connection was successful. $ nrsc5 -H 127.0.0.1:1234 91.9 0  IT worked as expected. Then I logged out and tried again, only instead of the ip address I entered the name of hostname. $ ssh user@ladmo.asuscomm.com -L 1234:ladmo.asuscomm.com:1234 Then I started rtl_tcp just like I did before. From the desktop machine I tried the same command again: $ nrsc5 -H 127.0.0.1:1234 91.9 0 This time I got an error message.  I checked the terminal window where I logged into the raspberry pi and saw this: channel 3: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused I logged out and tried again, only with the -v option: $ ssh -v user@machine.domain.com -L 1234:machine.domain.com:1234 I tried again: $ rtl_tcp -a 192.168.1.4 -p 1234 This time I got   a little more information: debug1: channel 3: free: direct-tcpip: listening port 3000 for machine.domain.com port 1234, connect from 127.0.0.1 port 56318 to 127.0.0.1 port 3000, nchannels 4 I tried one more time using the IP address assigned by my ISP.  It didn't work and I got the same message as above. Does anyone know why it doesn't work when I don't use the local IP address? The router is configured to forward incoming connections on port 22 to the raspberry pi. Thanks