How to overcome university network/internet restrictions (timeout, bittorrent, etc)
August 23, 2005 12:30 PM Subscribe
I haven't lived on a university campus for a couple years, and have forgotten how restrictive things can be as far as internet access is concerned. I know there are solutions to these problems -- I've read about them or things similar in the past -- I just can't seem to find much current information. I have a Mac, BTW.
1) Bittorrent: I use Azureus, and my download speed is severely capped -- I barely even get 1KBps. I imagine it's something to do with them throttling commonly used P2P ports, but even when I change my incoming port to (for example) 5555, it still gets throttled. I'm not trying to host GBs of porn and ripped movies, just have respectable usage of the technology when I need it. Any ideas?
2) Timeout: The network here likes to kick you offline if you are inactive for 20 minutes or more. For me, that's just enough time to download a couple files from my server in Dreamweaver, work on them, and then try to save the changes. There's got to be some kind of app for the Mac that sends out dummy bits periodically to keep your connection alive.
3) Etc: Any other experiences with overcoming campus network restrictions of any kind? 1 & 2 are just my experiences thus far -- who knows what idiocy I'll run into in the following months...
1) Bittorrent: I use Azureus, and my download speed is severely capped -- I barely even get 1KBps. I imagine it's something to do with them throttling commonly used P2P ports, but even when I change my incoming port to (for example) 5555, it still gets throttled. I'm not trying to host GBs of porn and ripped movies, just have respectable usage of the technology when I need it. Any ideas?
2) Timeout: The network here likes to kick you offline if you are inactive for 20 minutes or more. For me, that's just enough time to download a couple files from my server in Dreamweaver, work on them, and then try to save the changes. There's got to be some kind of app for the Mac that sends out dummy bits periodically to keep your connection alive.
3) Etc: Any other experiences with overcoming campus network restrictions of any kind? 1 & 2 are just my experiences thus far -- who knows what idiocy I'll run into in the following months...
It's more likely to be throttling. Having inbound connections blackholed does hurt BitTorrent speed, but I still routinely see 300kBps.
What you can do to get around throttling, if you like, is setup a link to a computer you control outside of your campus, run BitTorrent on THAT, and then transfer the end results over to your computer on campus via a non-throttled service. One of my friends has a spare computer at his parents' house grab his torrents, and then transfers them over SSH which isn't throttled by his university. Another friend at a different school does the same thing but gets much better results by setting the SSH server to port 80 (WWW) instead of the default 23. Some friends of theirs accomplish the same thing with FTP on various ports. YMMV.
posted by Ryvar at 1:08 PM on August 23, 2005
What you can do to get around throttling, if you like, is setup a link to a computer you control outside of your campus, run BitTorrent on THAT, and then transfer the end results over to your computer on campus via a non-throttled service. One of my friends has a spare computer at his parents' house grab his torrents, and then transfers them over SSH which isn't throttled by his university. Another friend at a different school does the same thing but gets much better results by setting the SSH server to port 80 (WWW) instead of the default 23. Some friends of theirs accomplish the same thing with FTP on various ports. YMMV.
posted by Ryvar at 1:08 PM on August 23, 2005
Read your university's network access policy and figure out what they do and don't allow. I've found that some university networks will disable bittorrent traffic by blocking the typical port ranges to incoming traffic, but then they'll go and do something completely ridiculous like allow webservers on resident machines for "academic purposes." A, uh, friend of mine, just routed all the incoming bittorrent traffic into port 80 and was all set.
I'm curious about what you mean when you say "kicked off." I'm assuming you mean the timeout on the FTP server where your web stuff is hosted, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the university (unless it was providing the hosting). If they're renewing your DHCP lease every 20 mins, that's a little extreme.
posted by mmcg at 1:21 PM on August 23, 2005
I'm curious about what you mean when you say "kicked off." I'm assuming you mean the timeout on the FTP server where your web stuff is hosted, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the university (unless it was providing the hosting). If they're renewing your DHCP lease every 20 mins, that's a little extreme.
posted by mmcg at 1:21 PM on August 23, 2005
Many decent FTP clients (such as Filezilla) will send occasional dummy instructions to the server to keep the connection alive.
Regarding bittorrent, it could be a few things. They could be restricting all inbound traffic (i.e., you're not in what's commonly called "clever mode," where you are discoverable) which means you can only connect to fully exposed people. However, you should still be able to get decent speeds so I'm guessing that they may be "packet shaping" (which is what my University did for certain classes of traffic). This is most likely difficult if not impossible to work around depending on the technologies involved; some googling/research into the subject could tell you more than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
posted by j.edwards at 1:41 PM on August 23, 2005
Regarding bittorrent, it could be a few things. They could be restricting all inbound traffic (i.e., you're not in what's commonly called "clever mode," where you are discoverable) which means you can only connect to fully exposed people. However, you should still be able to get decent speeds so I'm guessing that they may be "packet shaping" (which is what my University did for certain classes of traffic). This is most likely difficult if not impossible to work around depending on the technologies involved; some googling/research into the subject could tell you more than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
posted by j.edwards at 1:41 PM on August 23, 2005
For #2, will this do?
On this thread someone suggests:
"Yes, look in the System Prefs, Network tab and click on Ethernet.
At work and not on my Mac, so I can't say for sure where it is excactly located... but on the PPP tab somewhere is an Option button. Click on that and there is a whole slew of options. One is to stop Disconnect on Logout, Automatically connect to internet. AND, an option set the duration time for your connection, unselect this and it should remain on as long as you want (as long as your ISP doesn't disconnect you from there end after 2 or 3 hours as some do). Let me know if this works, or if you can't find it.
Cheers,Echo"
I can verify the solution, as I am on an XP machine.
posted by ori at 2:32 PM on August 23, 2005
On this thread someone suggests:
"Yes, look in the System Prefs, Network tab and click on Ethernet.
At work and not on my Mac, so I can't say for sure where it is excactly located... but on the PPP tab somewhere is an Option button. Click on that and there is a whole slew of options. One is to stop Disconnect on Logout, Automatically connect to internet. AND, an option set the duration time for your connection, unselect this and it should remain on as long as you want (as long as your ISP doesn't disconnect you from there end after 2 or 3 hours as some do). Let me know if this works, or if you can't find it.
Cheers,Echo"
I can verify the solution, as I am on an XP machine.
posted by ori at 2:32 PM on August 23, 2005
Followup to odinsdream: Cotse's SSH Express service is cheap and works great if you need that kind of thing to forward ports around. There'll be a performance hit but it's better than your existing situation. rstunnel is a good client. So is SSH Tunnel from rs4u (it too will keep you connected.
posted by evariste at 2:57 PM on August 23, 2005
posted by evariste at 2:57 PM on August 23, 2005
echoing SSH tunneling/etc on #1. cheap solution would be to VPN into a machine someone else is hosting - you wouldn't need to set up SSH port forwarding and VPN is pretty easy to set up on Windows XP (but much less so on everything else, afaik) and if you have access to an XP box that someone can set up incoming VPN on, your Mac can connect to it fine. plus, the overhead of the VPN should keep your connection active. bad thing is it's Another Thing That Has To Be Secured(tm). changing ports on BitTorrent (and other P2P apps) may not help because some packet shaper boxes (like the ones Packeteermake) utilize packet sniffing and such and can determine what protocol you're using to send your data, and throttle accordingly (within reason). things that move over SSL it can't really do much with, since they're encrypted.
posted by mrg at 4:43 PM on August 23, 2005
posted by mrg at 4:43 PM on August 23, 2005
Pah, as far as keeping your connection alive, just get one of the weather menu bar items and set it to check every 15 minutes. Or leave your mail program open and have it check every five minutes.
Wait. Are you on dial-up?
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:29 PM on August 23, 2005
Wait. Are you on dial-up?
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:29 PM on August 23, 2005
This thread is closed to new comments.
2. Try keeping a shell open and pinging something every 5 minutes. ping -i 300 google.com would work for this.
3. If there's actual web site filtering going on (seems unlikely), try using Tor. It will slow your browsing down noticeably, but will anonymize all your traffic and easily bypasses most web filters. Useful when you're on semi-restricted wifi also.
posted by autojack at 12:38 PM on August 23, 2005