I'm trying to establish an ssh tunnel over ssh to my mysql server which is only on my machine, the same machine everything running as localhost ... but I also need to return a mysqli db pointer just like if I was connecting directly to my database on my future hosting service machine. This is my first time looking into ssh in gereral, so I have nothing set-up yet. I want to do this for future practice using PHP5 locally before ordering any hosting services. I hope that make since. Would anyone have an working example of how this is done. Here is what I have on an single Windows-XP machine: httpd-2.2.19-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8r || php-5.3.8 || mysql-5.5.19-win32.msi Thanks in advance

You can't SSH from localhost to localhost. SSH Ports are either listening (server) or sending (client). They can't do both at once.

I've needed to do this before, only then, I used a SSH tunnel to a Linux box and used Xinetd to route my connection to localhost, all connections going to the MySQL server will show up connection from localhost then. But I'm not sure if there is an equivalent of Xinetd on Windows....