How to Create SSH tunnel to do port forwarding with putty to a remote MySQL-db w/o server setup?

Question

I want to SSH connect to a REMOTE MySQL db by pointing to, say, the LOCAL 3306 port; so far, I was able to do so by:

1. Installing/setting up FreeSSHd in the remote server (Windows 7).
2. Create an SSH tunnel and do port forwarding using putty.exe in the local machine (Windows 8.1)

I followed the instructions of these two articles here (in spanish, sorry :/ ):

1. FreeSSHd on the server
2. SSH tunneling

I've heard somewhere that if the remote server is running on Linux the step 1 is not always required. Do you guys know if there's a way/weird-trick to skip step 1 (setting up anything on the remote server, rather than installing MySQL Server)?

Answer 1

Oh I see why this is not possible: It looks like some Linux distros come with a program similar to FreeSSHd by default, and there for, you can skip installing other tools on the server though now I'm sure the configuration will be always required anyways.