An equivalent of ssh port-tunneling for Windows servers?

What's wrong with using Remote Desktop? What else are you trying to achieve? You say you're coming from a Windows 7 client into a Windows 2008 server and Remote Desktop is available. I don't understand the problem. Remote Desktop Server can be configured to let you choose from different internal servers from your client at home, with the proper voodoo. Your firewall sysadmin would be in control of this.

Vandyke Software has a solid SSH server product for Windows Server. It isn't free but it works. Firewalls aside, you can connect from Putty or any SSH client, and port forward. http://www.vandyke.com/products/vshell/

There's always gotomypc.com or that ilk.

How about this, presuming SSH is allowed outbound:

1. Run putty.exe on the server as Administrator with REMOTE port forwarding configured as part of a connection profile to your home Linux SSH server. This is the equivalent OpenSSH command if you have that on Win2008 like NitroxDM:

   [root@sqlserver]# ssh -R 5005:127.0.0.1:1433 [email protected]

   From the putty docs:

   You can also forward ports in the other direction: arrange for a particular port number on the server machine to be forwarded back to your PC as a connection to a service on your PC or near it. To do this, just select the ‘Remote’ radio button instead of the ‘Local’ one. The ‘Source port’ box will now specify a port number on the server (note that most servers will not allow you to use port numbers under 1024 for this purpose).

   If you're running Putty as Administrator, that should work in theory. It works from root in Linux, so it seems worth a shot.

2. Leave that running. Go home and connect from your SQL Console on your Windows 7 laptop to your home Linux box, which we're now treating as your own personal hackerish gotomypc.com server. That Linux box is now listening on TCP port 5005, and connections to that port will forward backwards over Putty to port 1433 (SQL) on Win2008. Configure your SQL tool, or command line, whatever, to connect to mylinux.athome.com:5005 and see what happens.