I have an ssh server and a vnc server. I am trying to accomplish an ssh tunnel. I have read the instructions. I wanna have traffic come through to port 80 and then forward to the vnc server(yes I know 80 is http thats fine). I get the privileged ports can only be forwarded by root. Running the command as root(yes I also know this is a bad thing) it gives me host key verfication fail. It does this also when I set the port higher than 1024 as a normal user so I guess my question is how do I generate a valid host key to accomplish this??

I know it is something like ssh_keygen -t but im not sure exactly what it should be

Im guessing I need to generate a key for my user account but I don't have access to ssh_keygen as a user and im not sure if it is safe to change the access on ssh_keygen

It probably means that the server host keys have changed since you last connected as root. Try editing /root/.ssh/known_hosts and remove the line starting with the remote machine's IP or hostname. You should be able to connect as root after that.

If it doesn't work, can you post the output from the ssh command with "-vv" added.