tunnel port 80

May 1, 2009 3:31 PM

I'm accessing the Internet via a public wireless system with most or all ports blocked except port 80, and perhaps port 443. Mainly I want to do some ftp to my website, or perhaps a remote admin session on my home computer. How can I tunnel traffic through port 80?

I am working mainly out of a public library for the moment. I've read the terms of use for the free wireless system and it doesn't seem to forbid using port 80 for other types of traffic. I'm not planning on downloading warez or doing bittorrent. I'm thinking there must be a way to tunnel traffic through port 80 for a couple of services I want to use like ftp and vnc. I have logmein setup on both sides but no connection attempt gets through.
I'm running Vista and Ubuntu dual booting on a laptop. I prefer using Ubuntu, but can use Vista if forced to with a hot pitchfork or necessity.
Thanks for any tips.

posted by diode to computers & internet (8 answers total)

--run sshd on your home computer
--config your router to pass port 80 or 443 to your home computer
--config sshd to listen on that port
--use putty to connect to sshd on that port
--putty can set up tunnels (e.g. I map local port 5904 to port 119 on my ISP news server; I
tell my newsreader that the newserver is localhost:5904)

--putty is a single executable, it does not need to be installed (not sure about putty's data files however)
--you can stop and start sshd from the services menu (or even from windows scheduler); I assume the same is possible under Ubuntu
posted by jockc at 3:38 PM on May 1, 2009

Do you have an SSH server you can login to and get internet access from? That makes all the difference -- tunneling after that is a snap. Otherwise I remember using the free version of this service a few years ago. Not sure how good it is now.
posted by suedehead at 3:38 PM on May 1, 2009

If your access is through a proxy server, maybe corkscrew can help.
posted by tomwheeler at 3:52 PM on May 1, 2009

To make this particularly interesting, your ISP at home might block incoming connections on those ports to prevent you from operating a web server. Regardless of the technical details (which I'm sure you'll get some great answers on here) you'll have to find a port number that is allowed out at the library as well as allowed in at home.
posted by FishBike at 4:04 PM on May 1, 2009

jockc has it almost right, except you don't need putty with Ubuntu.

Set up your home router to port forward external 443 (https) to your home PC's port 22 (ssh).

On your laptop, "apt-get install tsocks" (or whatever your preferred way to install an Ubuntu package). Edit /etc/tsocks.conf : comment out the "path" section, and change the default section to "server = 127.0.0.1" and "server_port = 1080".

On your laptop, do "ssh -p 443 -D 1080 your.home.router" and log in. You now have a dynamic SOCKS proxy from your laptop to your home machine. In addition to being logged in with ssh, on your laptop you can now run "tsocks somecommand" and the connection will be automatically forwarded through your home machine. For instance, "tsocks ftp some.other.machine" will establish a ftp session to some.other.machine that appears to originate from your home machine.

You could run "tsocks firefox", but it's probably better to just go into firefox's prefs->advance->connection and set your socks proxy there to be 127.0.0.1 port 1080
posted by fings at 9:24 PM on May 1, 2009

or perhaps a remote admin session on my home computer.

Its trivial to change the listening port for remote desktop. Just make it 443. I use remote desktop as a gateway into my home network. No fussing around with tunnels, ssh, etc.
posted by damn dirty ape at 11:41 PM on May 1, 2009

by the way, there is a win32 version of putty that's rewritten to store its configuration in files so you easily carry them around on a stick with the .exe -- its at http://jakub.kotrla.net/putty/ .

This is handy because configuring tunneling in putty is not particularly fast especially if you need to set up several tunnels. With regular putty you would likely have to do this everytime you use a new computer.
posted by 3mendo at 2:42 AM on May 2, 2009

There's an excellent tutorial about DNS tunneling in this episode of Hak 5.
posted by hippybear at 8:51 AM on May 2, 2009