Coccinellida 0.7

Coccinellida is intended to provide you with an easy way to configure and manage secured tunnel connections between your local computer and a remote machine.

In this respect, it saves you from stablishing such connections manually from Terminal. The application is very unobtrusive. It resides in the Menu Bar and can even be set to start along with the system. Luckily, you can create as many connections as you need as well as activate them at any moment with a single click.

In order to configure a new tunnel, you need to fill in a number of fields. In this regard, you should start by giving it a name. Likewise, you should provide the host IP and port as well as proper authentication data. Other fields let you specify SOCKS and port, connection timeout, alive count-max and alive interval. The lower pane will show the resulting command for you to check or copy. Finally, if you enable the Autostart option, the connection is automatically initiated whenever the app loads.

Although Coccinelida does nothing you cannot do from Terminal, it certainly makes it much easier to manage your secured connections, as you will not need to type the corresponding commands every time. The advantages of connecting through SSH tunnels is that your data will be transferred in encrypted form even if you are using an unencrypted protocol, like IMAP, VNC or IRC. Unfortunately, the tool has been reported as buggy, particularly for sometimes failing to start connections automatically. The product is opensource and there are no costs involved.