some ssh tunnel notes

While setting up an ssh server on Windows, found that PermitTunnel is not supported by the Microsoft port of OpenSSH-Server. But then, PermitTunnel is not required to do local port forwarding at the client side, like 
ssh -L 5990:192.168.12.34:5990 user@server.name

And interestingly, this sort of "poor man's VPN" using such an ssh tunnel seems to be much faster than OpenVPN etc as mentioned here, due to having less overhead.