On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Brian Wood <woodbrian77 at gmail.com> wrote: > Am still looking for some other examples. Examples of services using ssh tunnelling or examples of how services accept user-submitted ssh public keys? Perhaps it would be easier for you to give us your use case so we can better understand what you're trying to do. > When I start a tunnel, 3 ssh related processes show up. > When I kill the tunnel, those 3 processes go away. > Can someone tell me why 3 processes are used and if > there's a way to reduce it to 2 processes? I'm not sure what version of the OpenSSH server you're running, but on all the systems I have access to, each new ssh connection only spawns two new processes: one owned by root and one by the user I authenticated as: erik at host:~$ ps aux | grep -v grep | grep ssh | grep erik root 26628 0.0 0.2 73360 3572 ? Ss 23:10 0:00 sshd: erik [priv] erik 26759 0.0 0.0 73360 1668 ? S 23:10 0:00 sshd: erik at pts/0 The root-owned process is the parent, and serves as the broker between the user-owned process which deals with untrusted connections and the rest of the system. Out of curiosity, why are you so concerned with the number of processes OpenSSH is using? -Erik