i also don't really see where you'd need to tunnel and serve production traffic from your dev machine versus having a proper staging environment and testing there. that has "bad idea" written all over it.
> we’re all starting to see the benefits of having a production-like environment right there on your laptop so you can iteratively code and debug your app without deploying live, or even needing the Internet.
actually, real professionals have seen these benefits for ages. that is SOP for good programmers.
If you have access to your firewall, why not just open it up yourself?
If I want to temporarily open up my dev server so I can demo something to a client, this is beneficial because 1) it's a single line in my local terminal, not 30 clicks in a crappy router web admin and 2) it disappears as soon as I close the tunnel, I don't have to remember to undo the firewall changes.
However, if I knew a specific person were using this service (which, since this is a public website whose URL you share with one or more other people), I could find other ways to find it and then break the application or server behind the firewall and have access to a multitude of juicy information to steal. It's kind of like saying to an attacker: "hey, instead of attacking a random web server you could attack the developer's workstation!" Black hats like lulzsec, etc would have a ball.
I recommend a simple username/password combo at the very least to prevent unauthorized access. The whole 'access-behind-the-firewall' concept still gives me the heebie jeebies though, and I think short of a VM on the developer's workstation I would be very afraid to use such a service.
Thanks for the mention! Yes, we're similar, but built on more flexible technology (pure python, no ssh required, we can tunnel more protocols, etc.). Our solution is also open source for those who don't want to rely on a third-party front-end.
If people are trying it for the first time, I kinda recommend trying the new 0.4 release, it is way more user friendly than the old 0.3 which we consider 'stable'.
http://pogodan.com/blog/2011/05/03/reverse-ssh-tunnel-any-ra...
