The local port is not privileged. Check.
The local port differs from the remote. Check.
I have not been able to find anything in the logs about my problem either locally or remotely. I can only find the message in auth.log about my successfully connecting. The remote configuration says for logging:
\n# Logging\nSyslogFacility AUTH\nLogLevel INFO\n#obsoletes QuietMode and FascistLogging\n
It may be that I need to change something there.
There is nothing at the remote end about port forwarding other than that X11 is allowed. However when I tried to do X11 forwarding I got a message about not being allowed to write to my .Xauthority file. When I change permissions on it I can't lock it. (Probably because I'm running X on that machine already...) But I don't think that is a sign that ssh is disallowing port forwarding. Are there any configuration variables that I should be looking for or setting?
From the documentation I thought that -R was the wrong way around. I just tried that as an experiment when -L kept on failing for me.
What else should I check?
Thanks,
Ben