Create a persistent reverse tunnel for a server behind firewall

To do this, you need to have a middleman server (middleman) to act as intermediaries between your workstation and the server behind firewall (target). The best is to have your middleman server running ssh server on the usual port that firewall allows, for example 80 and 443.

Step 1: In the target server, create a passwordless ssh access to your middleman server. Please refer here on how to accomplish that

Step 2: Create a simple bash script in target server that will check for the reverse tunnel connection, and restart the tunnel if the tunnel is broken. Lets say in this case, my middleman ssh server is running on port 443, you want to create a reverse tunnel on port 2222 on middleman server, and you want to use a user called foo in the middleman server. Don't forget to make the script executable by the owner.

$ cat /home/foo/bin/tunnelcheck.sh

#!/bin/bash

SERVER=middleman

SPORT=443

PORT=2222

USER=foo

ssh $USER@$SERVER -p $SPORT -t nc -vz localhost $PORT > /dev/null 2>&1

if [ $? -ne 0 ];

  then ssh -R $PORT:localhost:22 -l $USER -fN $SERVER -p $SPORT

fi

$ chmod u+x /home/foo/bin/tunnelcheck.sh


Step 3: Set a crontab to run the above script every 10 minutes (or whatever interval you think is appropriate)
$ crontab -e
*/10 * * * * /home/foo/bin/tunnelcheck.sh


Step 4: Test the persistency by killing the ssh tunnel, and wait for crontab to run the tunnelcheck.sh script, and restart the tunnel

Step 5: You are now able to access the target server, simply by ssh'ng into port 2222 on middleman server
$ ssh foo@middleman -p 2222

How to test that your usb live cd is working

To do this, you need qemu-kvm. Install it:
$ sudo apt install qemu-kvm


Check the address of your usb, by using dmesg
$ dmesg | grep sd


Once you have the address, you can start it using below command (make sure you allocate at least 1024M memory, else it will return kernel panic)
$ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -hda /dev/sdb


To use a cdrom, you can use below command
$ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -cdrom /dev/cdrom


You can also test an iso file, using below command
$ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -cdrom centos.iso