There are some third party tools that lets you expose a local port from your workstation or laptop to the internet, like Cloudfare, Ngrok or even Tailscale, but all traffic is routed through these (American) company servers. Is there a system on TELIN that can do the same? Well, yes of course!
You can make use of the bore tunnel on our TELIN servers. I have provide the services on the following hosts:
You can download the bore tunnel software from bore github depending on your computer and OS system.
Extract the zip or tar.gz file and place the bore executable in your search path. Linux and Mac users can use ~/bin or ~/.local/bin, windows users can use c:\windows or where you installed the executable.
The windows version is falsely flagged as malicious by https://www.virustotal.com/, to make sure we recompiled the version here, which seems to do a bit better:
You made an application that listens on port 8080. This is the command to make a tunnel:
bore local 8080 --to telin.ugent.be -s <secret>
The program response with a random port nummer available on the telin.ugent.be server, in this case port 9916, which you can access from everywhere!
2026-02-18T11:51:34.008169Z INFO bore_cli::client: connected to server remote_port=9916
2026-02-18T11:51:34.008184Z INFO bore_cli::client: listening at telin.ugent.be:9916
If your application is a webservice, you can point your browser to telin.ugent.be:9916 and you or a third party can access your app from anywhere.
The apps can also be services already on your system, e.g. openssh (port 22) or windows remote desktop from your home computer (port 3389). Another use case is the access to your disk or apps from the HPC cluster. Another use case is sharing data from your workstation to third parties, your vibe coded apps, etc… Many doors are opened now 😉
Get the <secret> word from your sysadmin!