Simple port tunnelling (-L and -R command line arguments) do not suffer from TCP over TCP. And if you want VPN-style usage, look into sshuttle. It is one way on

Simple port tunnelling (-L and -R command line arguments) do not suffer from TCP over TCP. And if you want VPN-style usage, look into sshuttle. It is one way only, and that's a good thing! (Most of the time you only need connections going one way and none going the other way). If you do want two way, either use two sshuttle connections (one each way) or OpenVPN. The only thing about sshuttle that I've encountered that exposes it's non-VPNness, is that the connection truly originate from the remote system - e.g. if you connect through sshuttle to your peer, the connection go from the peer to the peer on 127.0.0.1. That may or may not be a problem (e.g., logging is much less useful this way). Try sshuttle. I've stopped using VPNs since I started.