An SSH jump server is a regular Linux server, accessible from the Internet, which is used as a gateway to access other Linux machines on a private network using the SSH protocol. The purpose of an SSH jump server is to be the only gateway for access to your infrastructure reducing the size of any potential attack surface.

In this blog post we’ll cover how to set up an SSH jump server. We’ll cover two open source projects.

1. A traditional SSH jump server using OpenSSH. The advantage of this method is that your servers already have OpenSSH pre-installed.
2. A modern approach using Teleport, a newer open source alternative to OpenSSH.

Both of these servers are easy to install and configure, are free and open source, and are single-binary Linux daemons.