Want to get around firewall

[monkeyhead]

i want to get around my schools firewall simply to play games online, they block everything.
Is there a simple way to do this or someone willing to explain.
i also do not want to draw attention where the school wont like me. I have cable at home and have been told to route to my house and out from there, but im not sure on how to do this.
Thanks

[Boston_Bob]

im not advocating that you go around the networking guys at your school, who have probably set up the firewall as a way to limit bandwidth use and supply better sevice to everyone as a whole.... BUT you could.

One way is to "re-route" the traffic to your home conection. This will hurt your lag time in the game but it shouldn't be too bad if your home conection is cable like you said and isn't too slow.

The idea is to fool your schools firewall into thinking it is routing regular HTTP or FTP( or whatever port isnt blocked) traffic to your computer. The first thing you have to do is find out which ports arent blocked. Start with port 80 (HTTP) then 110 (POP) then 25 (SMTP) then 21 (FTP), I've dealt with firewalls at school and these are most likely to be open. You may find others, depending on how the firewall is managed.

Any packets coming from your computer need to have these ports in their destination in order for them to pass through the firewall. Therefore your home machine must accepts connections on that same port and forward them to your game server, it also must be able to listen for responses from your game server and pass them back to you via the same port you used to bypass the firewall.

I don't know how experienced you are with IP and routing but its not too hard to do this with proxy software and then tell your school computer to use your home machine as a proxy (make sure the proxy is set up to listen on a port that isnt blocked)

Or you could use something simple like netcat set up to listen on your home machine and forward the connection on, this would probably have to be set up on a game per game basis though.

As a last resort you might find SSH as an interesting option. If you set up an SSH server on your home machine on port 80 and a client on your school machine and tunnel your games TCP connections via that, not only would it be going around your schools firewall but it would also be encrypted, so even if they have an application level firewall it would still get past. Ive never tried that, it just occured to me as I was writing this, but i dont see why it wouldnt work...

I hope this helps you out, but once again I dont recommend doing it, the network guys at your schol have the firewall there for a reason and im not advocating that you get past it on purpose.

[monkeyhead]

i do understand its not a good idea, but thank you.....
so tell me a little more about an SSH server

[Boston_Bob]

SSH started as an encrypted alternative to telnet

the part you would be interested in would be a feature called port forwarding (not in the router/private IP sense). What this feature lets you do is forward or "tunnel" local ports to a remote machine running an SSH server. All this tunneling is done via SSH's connection to the server on one port. Therefore you can have multiple simultaneous port connections all being forwarded to their destination via the remote servers IP.

What this means for you is if set up your server at home to listen on port 80 (or another port I pointed out in a previous post) you can use port 80 as SSH's control port and fool your schools firewall into letting that traffic through. Once the traffic gets to the SSH server on your home machine it connects to the game server as if it were originating from your home machine, the game server then replies to your home machine and it in turn sends that info back to you from port 80 (once again bypassing the firewall). When that info hits the SSH client on your machine at school it is once again split to its respective port and given to your game client.

The only tricky thing about this setup is making sure that your game can connect to local ports in order to reach the game server. Because SSH forwards these local ports it will be tranparent to your game but you will have to connect to 'localhost' or '127.0.0.1' and set SSH to tunnel these connections to the game servers IP.

Is that any clearer to you?

Take a look at
www.ssh.com (http://www.ssh.com)
OR
www.openssh.com (http://www.openssh.com)

good luck

once again as a disclaimer i giving you this as an educational resource, not in order to circumvent any real security measures.

If you wonder why im paranoid about this you should check out the new anti-terrorism bill being passes by ashcroft and how it includes defeating or giving info on how to defeat computer security as punishable as a terrorist act. (im all for tracking down the bastards, but that goes too far)

best of luck

[monkeyhead]

thank you very much for your help, i hope i can get this to work, all i want is to get around the firewall to play games, the bastards here block everything, i mean everything

[cobra25]

they probably think you should be learning and not playing games.... (i think they're right)

[monkeyhead]

yeah i am learning, how to manipulate firewalls and such, without causing harm. Also, im a computer science major, i need to know these things

[Boston_Bob]

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/07/22/stinwenws03005.html


:) I knew I saw this somewhere....took me a while to find it though:)