This project is about using Salt SSH for managing systems without the need of an additional agent to be installed (besides sshd). With the SSH protocol the connection is initiated by the management server, thus Salt SSH can be used to even manage systems that are located outside of company firewalls, i.e. machines that cannot access a salt-master due to firewall restrictions.

In order to still be able to access resources inside a company network though it would be very helpful if the salt-ssh command supported remote port forwarding (as with the -R parameter of the ssh command) for tunneling other traffic through the existing ssh connection, for instance a package manager might want to install packages from a company internal RPM repository. A patch was therefore contributed to Salt SSH in order to enable this feature (merged into develop):

• https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/34398

Further this project is also about improving Salt SSH support in the Salt API client Java library salt-netapi-client. There is a WIP pull request that will be extended to support all the options that are available for salt-ssh.