tunneling through stdin/stdout, source routing

[Simon Richter]

Hi,

quite often I find myself using commands like

$ ssh foo nc bar 12345

to connect to another host behind a firewall, and I also have a lot of
these commands in my ssh config file. Since this relies on the server
having netcat available (which a lot don't, or in some really old
version that will not shut down properly) it breaks often, and I wonder
whether it would make sense to have an option in the ssh client that
told it to connect to the server, then open a tunneled connection and
connect that to stdin/stdout.

As an extension, there could also be a source routing option in the
config file that would take care of setting up a chain of ssh
connections if I need multiple hops.

As far as I can see this requires no special support from the server, so
should be easy to implement; I'm not sure though how I would go about
implementing such a thing in OpenSSH because of the development model
that would effectively require me to run OpenBSD to test my patches
before submitting them.

Any ideas?

   Simon