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I am trying to copy files from a remote server to my local server, however, my remote server first requires me to connect to an intermediate host and then leapfrog onto the actual server from there. I am wondering how would I go about copying files from my remote server to my local machine with the scp command using this leapfrogging technique?
So first I have to connect to intermediate server, then from there I want to connect to my actual server.
With modern versions of ssh this is very easy using the concept of a ProxyJump at least if you have keys set up.
Let us call the 3 machines L, I, and R (for local, intermediate, and remote). Assume to start with that the usernames are all the same.
The command required is then
scp -oProxyJump=I R:remote_file localfile
If the usernames are different then replace I with user@I and R with user@R.
If you are using ssh, the command would be:
ssh -J [user@]I [user@]R
ProxyJump and is invoked when using 'ssh' by the -J [<user>@]<destination> flag. The scp command is slightly differnet, as it makes use of the -oProxyJump=[<user>@]<destination> syntax. Or at least that's what happens (and what the manual pages say) on the two machines where I tested this solution...
scp -r -oProxyJump=I R:remote_dir ./local_dir
You can do this by editing your ssh configuration to include a proxy. scp uses ssh for remote connections so just editing the ssh config should work. Use your "intermediate server" as the proxy.
Add something like this to your ~/.ssh/config file:
Host target.machine
User targetuser
HostName target.machine
ProxyCommand ssh [email protected] nc %h %p 2> /dev/null
Then just use scp as if you are connecting directly to the remote server.
To give credit where it's due, I took this from here.
