Fascinating.

How well do you know this friend?

If you SSH tunnel into his server that is fine, but if you unknowingly run the command that opens a server up on your end he would get full access to everything on your PC. Not to mention, he doesn't want to open port 25565 for Minecraft but is willing to open port 22 for SSH? Seems fishy.

He would be better off just using Ngrok to allow tunnelling

Obvious troll is obvious lol.

Try goody putty, for me it always worked fine. https://www.amazon.com/Goody-Putty-Color-Changing-Pack/dp/B07W8DTZ9T?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.jJkYF8PSlQtHyp2Uvpajaaz7mezguye7q96jgUqI1UuMoqef74nHeC1qSKOiL3xwjJEjzbq8lWKw9DoeeFn-KDR4-e34sziZVXqckHUZYaa9M6VpqvyWnUOtDZJmXeFEfu2V9kftlsMAv6IDcanQvawp1ZL1Q6XEs0zPL1l9ECamRS2BpKi5o2fExDdrtAX1pFNb3b_sKGQPFxv96atkXwoiysve0iM4mcQ87z2ctv-CBFxUyNNTd4DIY71c8ui2E0CaIY_GaAo9kyzB65IwadyWxqm4H0FyPXjvbZqSH_o.LElFIiRl7L99eeaBcRQnV1BjmzDtaEFbjQnw2qadTpY&dib_tag=se

Okay. Crowbar of separation here.

Yes Putty is legit. It is used all the time. It does the ssh ftp scp etc stuff that is very native to *nix

Now. Your friend sounds sketchy. And yeah. Don’t go putting in commands that you don’t understand

SSH tunnels are very real. That’s how I get to work from home.

But do be very careful

Something like tailscale might be an easier and more reliable solution than trying to keep a ssh tunnel up all the time.

Also win10/11 has ssh natively so you don't need a third party ssh solution like putty

Windows has ssh built in now so I'm pretty sure you don't need putty to tunnel anymore.

It's good that you're wary of pasting stuff you don't understand into your command prompt. You can do just about anything from there, so someone could easily take over your computer if they wanted. But if you trust this friend enough and want to verify the command, you could copy-paste it into something like ChatGPT to determine what the command does. An SSH tunnel should be simple enough for it to understand.

Holy shit that’s based