Tunneling qemu guest back and forth

Using the virtual guests sooner or later you need to have a way to transfer data between guest and host. If you just need to transfer files, it's relatively easy. There is a good document describing many possible ways of doing it in the qemu Puppy project.

But sometimes you want to pretend your virtual guest is a real machine: you want to log in into it, have multiple sessions, start GUI programs and so on. The easiest way to achieve it is use an ssh tunnel. This method is actually neither Solaris, nor qemu specific: you can do the same for exposing machines from your intranet to the outer world. How it works:

You start a ssh daemon (sshd) on your guest and on your host (or any other machine which will work as a representative for the guest). Then on your guest you say:

ssh -R 10022:localhost:22 hostuser@10.0.2.2

This opens a tunnel. If someone has an access to the host's port 10022 she can also login to your guest. So beware that your guest is exposed to the outer world after this point.

Now you can log in into your guest from the host using
ssh -X -p10022 guestuser@localhost
or from anywhere where your host is reachable using
ssh -X -p10022 guestuser@

The -X option is used to turn on X11 forwarding. From the sessions started like this you can run GUI applications.

It's also possible to transfer data via sftp:
sftp -o "port=10022" guestuser@localhost