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August 16, 2005

Working around the system

At the request of one of the other Time of Darkness staff, I've been looking at ways to work around restrictive firewall rules. You know the ones - "I just plugged into the college network. I can surf the net, but they won't let me mud".

The telnet protocol is often used to hack into things, and colleges are rampant with that kind of thing, so it makes sense for them to block the protocol, stopping people logging in to servers directly, and inderectly, cutting off mud access, even though it's off-campus.

May you all forgive me, Dulthail is now back online.

There is a solution and it's called Tunnelling. Rather like digging under the fences, it wraps up the telnet data inside HTTP traffic, and masquerades it's way out to the internet, where it goes to an interim machine that unwraps it and sends it to where it was meant to go in the first place.

There are free ways to do this and commercial ways. The free way requires that you have a second computer outside, permenantly connected to translate back from HTPP to telnet, which, in this case, wasn't available.

The commercial solution is far simpler, and costs around $4 a month. Download a client, click the auto configure button and set up a proxy in your mud client and you're back online.

And that is it. Around 5 minutes later, he was on the mud and I was wondering what the hell I just did and whether I would be struck by lightning for doing it.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at August 16, 2005 01:28 PM

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