I open an ssh tunnel all the time while I’m work.   I found this nifty little app a while back for my Mac that manages all my ssh tunnels.

I could open up a term, and  type ssh -N -p 22 -c 3des jhigley@XXX.dnsalias.com -L 6667:XXX.dnsalias.com:6667 each time I wanted to open up an ssh tunnel for IRC, but instead I open up STM and it auto connects each of my tunnels for me. 

 You can get it here.