Firewall bypass

pimpy_c

I'm sitting here in a wireless hot spot in UCD and thinking to myself "I should be able to play a few rounds of Counter-strike right now! Unfortunately, UCD have some annoying firewall that won't allow access to any servers. I just want to know if anyone can tell me about a way around this! Such a shame to let a frantically fast internet connection to go to waste! It really grinds my gears

Syth

pimpy_c wrote:

I'm sitting here in a wireless hot spot in UCD and thinking to myself "I should be able to play a few rounds of Counter-strike right now! Unfortunately, UCD have some annoying firewall that won't allow access to any servers. I just want to know if anyone can tell me about a way around this! Such a shame to let a frantically fast internet connection to go to waste! It really grinds my gears

Eh.... What has this to do with Open Source? Better of with the Computer, Games or UCD board at a guess.

SolarNexus

The only way I know of would be to setup your own server which would run on a specified port (80 would be a good guess)

the_syco

How about... no. Some of those techs read this here boards, and boards may get in trouble if they tell you how to bypass the firewall, so that you can download donkey pr0n, or whatever floats your boat.

SolarNexus

the_syco wrote:

How about... no. Some of those techs read this here boards, and boards may get in trouble if they tell you how to bypass the firewall, so that you can download donkey pr0n, or whatever floats your boat.

I agree with that, but if its just to play a game, and if you can setup a game to run on an authorised port, I cant see the harm.

Mutant_Fruit

aye, but an authorised port could be used for anything! Including donkey pron as the syco kindly pointed out. Quite simply, it can't be done. Especially for such a latency dependant game. You wouldn't get a ping of better than 400ms.

Of course, taht didn't stop me playing WoW while in UCD. I have ways and means... ways and means. And no, my ways and means wouldn't work for CS. They're too limited to allow the traffic CS needs. It'd be laggy as crap.

I'll go enjoy some WoW tomorrow though

rogue-entity

Actualy, first the only reason that UCD has such a fast internet connection, is because UCD is the main internet backbone for the entire country and it is through UCD that all other ISPs get there Internet Connectivity, UCD connects Ireland to London, and from there, the rest of the world, damn it seems we are still dependent on britain for somethig :mad:
UCD also hosts the .ie root servers and when they were in charge of .ie they charged a fortune to register one, now IEDR is in charge and they are still massivly expesive. €80/year compared to €10/year for .com/net/org and €7 for .uk (looks like we are still being ripped off).
A friend of mine once told me that while in UCD he was able to download 2GB of data in under an hour. It really is a shame to let such a good internet connection go to waste but to be honest, getting a fast internet connection just for playing games is really pointless, there are much better things that I can think of with an internet connection that fast. Downloading Linux ISO's for a start, (legal) movies for another, or better again getting all of season 4, and parts of season 5 of family guy months before they are released over here.

Anyway, what I would use to bypass the baxtard firewall is an SSH tunnel, an SSH server can easily be setup on an external server and set to use a port like 80 or 443. I also strongly criticise those that would stop people posting requests on bypassing firewalls for the porpous of playin games or accessing wrongly blocked sites, I mean just because a few tech-heads at UCD see things like that posted here does not give them the right to complain to boards.ie after all it is freedom of speech and besides, it is not illegal to provide information on bypassing firewalls.

oscarBravo

rogue-entity wrote:

Actualy, first the only reason that UCD has such a fast internet connection, is because UCD is the main internet backbone for the entire country and it is through UCD that all other ISPs get there Internet Connectivity, UCD connects Ireland to London, and from there, the rest of the world, damn it seems we are still dependent on britain for somethig :mad:

Um.

wtf??

Where the hell did you get this particular hairbrained theory from?

rogue-entity wrote:

...it is not illegal to provide information on bypassing firewalls.

Maybe not, but bypassing firewalls is a bad idea. When I ran a corporate firewall, if I caught someone bypassing it I'd reprimand their ass.

I don't care whether you agree with the reasons for having a firewall or not, it's not your network so you don't get a say. End of.

rogue-entity

That "hairbrained" thoery is correct. UCD runs a Point-Of-Presence for Ireland. They run what I think is called Inex (Irish Internet Exchange) which is where the data centres and ISPs connect to the rest of the world. the UCD POP connects to Linx (London Internet Exchange) which is in the Guinness book of records for having the most bandwidth or connectivity or something. There are other POPs in the country but I am not sure where, one person told me that there was one in Waterford.

Firewalls are a good idea, I run two of them on my home network. I would think the internet to be too unsafe without them, but some bodies have an over-restrictive firewall which blocks ports/services that I use on a regular basis, such as SSH. And sometimes the censornet also blocks free-hosted sites, something that I think is overkill, as not all of these sites have objectionable material (N2H2/Bess does this to ISP hosted sites as well). This is where I have a problem and most of the time, I just talk to the sysadmin that runs the firewall and ask him/her to allow access to the required services/sites. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they dont.

In short, I dont object to corporate firewalls, they serve a porpous and if I were in the position that the UCD tech-heads were in I would do the same thing that they do, all I was saying is that from the end-users perspective they can be a real pain.

oscarBravo

rogue-entity wrote:

That "hairbrained" thoery is correct. UCD runs a Point-Of-Presence for Ireland. They run what I think is called Inex (Irish Internet Exchange) which is where the data centres and ISPs connect to the rest of the world.

The INEX is the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange, which is where Irish ISPs exchange traffic among themselves to avoid that traffic having to leave the country first. The INEX is not a means of moving Irish Internet traffic to the rest of the 'net.

The INEX is hosted by Data Electronics Group in their data centre in Kilcarbery Park. It has nothing to do (so far as I can tell) with UCD.

edit: Actually, it seems to be jointly hosted by DEG and Telecity. Still nowt to do with UCD.

rogue-entity wrote:

In short, I dont object to corporate firewalls, they serve a porpous and if I were in the position that the UCD tech-heads were in I would do the same thing that they do, all I was saying is that from the end-users perspective they can be a real pain.

True, but that doesn't entitle the end-user to circumvent the security features put in place by the administrator of the network the user has been given the privilege of using.

D

I agree with oscar bravo, while as a student who like gaming in college it's a bitch, in the current state of the internet it is important, and as stated earlier, its their network. It is there for the sole reason of academia, not for gaming. Although "some people" talk about UT "gaming session" in "certain labs" ¬_¬

rogue-entity

oscarBravo wrote:

The INEX is the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange, which is where Irish ISPs exchange traffic among themselves to avoid that traffic having to leave the country first. The INEX is not a means of moving Irish Internet traffic to the rest of the 'net.

Sorry my mistake, I thought INEX was the name of the POP hosted by UCD.
But I was right in saying that UCD do (or at least did) host a POP that connects Ireland to London (or at least the UK) That enables traffic to be routed to the UK and by extension the rest of the world, but it is reasonable to assume that there are other POPs around the country including in Waterford that provide "external" connectivity. I got this information from a friend, so I apologise for being mistaken, perhaps I should have looked it up before posting.

True, but that doesn't entitle the end-user to circumvent the security features put in place by the administrator of the network the user has been given the privilege of using.

True. I dont intentionaly bypass firewalls, at least not the whole time. I usualy try to access services that I want, SSH for example, and when I cannot access them I usualy ask the sysadmin to allow the services, even if it is just to the specific servers that I access. It does annoy me when places block SSH and FTP uploads or free-hosted sites because they are free hosted (N2H2). And I agree, it is not our place to bypass those firewalls, I agree college networks are for the acadaemia, but academics dont need 30Mbit connections, 2Meg would be enough. People like me who regularly download files in excess of 600Mb do need this kind of speed however so you can forgive us if we like to use our free college connections to download stuff.

wingnut

Chances are they may have a back door in the form of Microsoft Firewall Client which can connect to an ISA server that is in front of the firewall. The ISA serve can sit on the main proxy server or a seperate server (you'll have to snoop to find out which server it is on if it exists at all). A lot of colleges use this so their tech guys can do bypass the firewall temporailiy to carry out tasks on machines. I used to be a techie for a large University and thats what we used.

MiCr0

i think closing this thread is the way forward