Aw man, I was hoping this would be a passthrough mode for the transport.<p>Sometimes I'd like to have secure authentication but otherwise have no encryption — the overhead is way too high on slower boxes when you have a good amount of bandwidth available. One classic case I'd run into is using a nice old Sparc workstation as a remote X terminal to a fast new box: if I used SSH to forward the X session its process would regularly spike the local CPU, so I would end up just using a completely insecure X server instead.<p>It can be too slow even on decently fast boxes when you have gigabits of bandwidth available — I'd just end up piping tar through netcat to avoid the overhead.
A really useful thing I use with ssh and netcat is to forward SSH connections through a bastion host like this - <a href="http://backdrift.org/transparent-proxy-with-ssh" rel="nofollow">http://backdrift.org/transparent-proxy-with-ssh</a><p>It looks like netcat can be substituted with the openssh 5.4 builtin.
Currently, just open one term window to do the 'ssh -L', and a second window to do the 'nc'.<p>This enhancement just saves me the trouble of opening a term window.