Occasionally you may find yourself using a network behind a firewall that doesn’t allow outgoing TCP connections with a destination port of 22, meaning you’re unable to connect to your OpenSSH server, perhaps to take advantage of a SOCKS proxy for encrypted and unfiltered web browsing.

Since these restricted networks almost always allow port 443 out, since it’s the destination port for outgoing HTTPS requests, an easy workaround is to have your OpenSSH server listen on port 443 if it isn’t already using the port.

This is sometimes given as a rationale for changing the sshd port completely, but you don’t need to do that; you can simply add another Port directive to sshd_config(5):

Port 22
Port 443

After restarting the OpenSSH server with this new line in place, you can verify that it’s listening with ss(8) or netstat(8)

# ss -lnp src :22
State      Recv-Q Send-Q    Local Address:Port      Peer Address:Port
LISTEN     0      128                  :::22                  :::*
users:(("sshd",3039,6))
LISTEN     0      128                   *:22                   *:*
users:(("sshd",3039,5))
# ss -lnp src :443
State      Recv-Q Send-Q    Local Address:Port      Peer Address:Port
LISTEN     0      128                  :::443                 :::*
users:(("sshd",3039,4))
LISTEN     0      128                   *:443                  *:*
users:(("sshd",3039,3))

You’ll then be able to connect to the server on port 443, the same way you would on port 22. If you intend this setup to be permanent, it would be a good idea to save the configuration in your ssh_config(5) file, or whichever SSH client you happen to use.