Bypassing a student residence firewall?

February 26, 2004 4:42 PM

I am in a student residence that has recently shut down the ports that allow filesharing, and as such, the only file sharing program I can use is SoulSeek (I was just getting into "Sharing the Groove" too!!). Assuming I am using file sharing for (mostly) legal uses, is there anyway to bypass a firewall like this?
posted by Quartermass to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

What's with the SoulSeek bashing? Can you provide a little more info? Are they blocking a specific set of ports ("the ports that allow filesharing") or are they banning all ports and then just allowing the sensible ones (e.g., 80, 443, 25)? It sounds like the former if SoulSeek is still working, so anything that lets you define the in- and outbound ports should work.
posted by yerfatma at 4:48 PM on February 26, 2004

Response by poster: Don't get me wrong, Soulseek is number 1 in my books (Look me up - MyLadyLove - I have the live Smile from last Friday!), but it does have a lot of limitations (ie downloading is 1 to 1, and as such, can take forever!).

The problem is I don't know what they did (I think they left it ambigous on purpose). I agree that it is probably the latter, but I am not savy enough to know how to tell what ports are open.

Perhaps that is a better way to phrase my question. How can I see what ports are open?
posted by Quartermass at 4:52 PM on February 26, 2004

Bittorrent is your friend.
posted by yangwar at 4:56 PM on February 26, 2004

Response by poster: That's the thing - I can't even get Bittorrent to connect!
posted by Quartermass at 5:01 PM on February 26, 2004

If people really want to file share in peace, they need to set up a new network of dial-up BBSes. No one would ever touch it.
posted by inksyndicate at 6:30 PM on February 26, 2004

Well, if you're motivated to get past "the man", here's how you do it:

http://quark.humbug.org.au//publications/ssh-port-forward.html
posted by Fupped Duck at 7:01 PM on February 26, 2004

At my dorm, they shut down filesharing, yet Ares is the only one that still works. Just a suggestion
posted by jmd82 at 7:21 PM on February 26, 2004

Set up a wireless ad-hoc mesh network.

l33t.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:32 PM on February 26, 2004

If they're just blocking ports, just use another one. If Soulseek works (it uses port 2234), tell Bittorrent to use it instead. Advanced bittorrent clients like Azureus let you do this. You may have problems connecting to other people in the swarm who use Bittorrent's default port of 8881, but will be able to connect to you, getting some bits through.
posted by zsazsa at 8:47 PM on February 26, 2004

The latest slsk version lets you set it to listen on whatever port you want.
posted by ph00dz at 8:56 PM on February 26, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions!!! Ask me saves the day (again)!
posted by Quartermass at 10:05 PM on February 26, 2004

Do consider how your filesharing may be impacting your school's network. It's one thing to go on the odd downloading mission, but if you're downloading movies 24/7 you're fucking up the network for others. That kind of activity can suck up even the biggest bandwidth.

Now, if your school is having a problem like that, the thing they SHOULD be doing is throttling the bandwidth on the hogs with traffic shaping. Blocking ports just turns into a battle between the network admins and the users. Consider also that if you continue to escalate that battle, it could end up in your port being turned off. It's not unheard of.

My campus started traffic shaping after a week or two of horrid network congestion right after the fall semester started a couple of years ago. Stopped the congestion problems without preventing reasonable folks from being able to partake of filesharing systems.
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:35 AM on February 27, 2004

armoured-ant: unless you're simply sharing inside the network, someone's still going to have to have an unblocked feed to the rest of the net
posted by cheaily at 7:15 AM on February 27, 2004

So there are a couple of things that no-one has mentioned: If you can get access to another machine on campus that insn't inside the firewall / blocked ports you may be able to remote desktop, or install a proxy server on that machine and tunnel through it. (Not that I would have *any* experience doing that.)
posted by woil at 12:26 AM on February 28, 2004