Ask Slashdot: Dealing With University Firewalls?

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 26, 2012 @08:42PM from the little-fiefdoms dept.

An anonymous reader writes "My university only provides access to the web, via a restrictive content filter and proxy service. There is no access to the wider internet. I was wondering if this is common, and if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about protesting the issue. I've spoken to the lecturers and they have the same frustrations I do. I've also spoken to the head of the IT department who spouted lines about 'protecting the network.' This is very frustrating, I've seen a number of students making use of 3G/4G dongles to get access to the net and this just seems crazy. The restrictions applied to the web are draconian, with sites such as hackaday, hypberbole and a half, somethingawful, etc being blocked." What would you do to get better access?

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Tributes by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-26 20:45 · Score: 5, Informative

Become friends with a member of the IT department. Alcohol can go a long way in beginning an IT related friendship.
Re:ssh is permitted? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-26 21:39 · Score: 5, Informative

The solution then is to use port 443 to run SSH. I have a free trial of Amazon EC2 I use for that kind of thing. The speeds are good, you can even watch YouTube with relatively little buffering. If anyone is interested I have it set up:
Browser
v
SSH Socks Proxy
v
corkscrew (software to send ssh through an http proxy, you can also use PUTTY on windows for this)
v
CNTLM (you may not need this but I do because the proxy I go through uses NTLM authentication)
v
SSH server running on port 443.
Re:ssh is permitted? by mverwijs · 2012-02-26 22:22 · Score: 5, Informative

sslh for the win!
Just 'apt-get install sslh', have it run on port 443. It will forward HTTPS traffic to your apache server running on whatever port you run it on, while forwarding ssh traffic to sshd.
It's just.... beautiful.