Getting around firewalls

[TacoTaru]

A friend of mine is attending college and can't get around her campus's firewalls to share anything via AIM, Yahoo, etc. Even more, we tried to set us some file sharing through a p2p program, and the firewall restricts her from even connecting to the p2p server at all.

Is there anyway to get around this? I tried to look up some information on proxies, but those just seemed to be for surfing the web, and wouldn't help with file sharing via AIM or any p2p programs.

[Cephius]

There are a few things to do, but in all likelyhood it will take some work and/or money to get it done. It's easy to say your friend is fucked, and she probably is, but it depends on how restrictive her school's network is. And it sounds like it's pretty bad.

Anyway, if the school is just using port filtering (ie, blocking every port and then just allowing the few that is needed to access the internet and some other programs) you can try setting your torrent program to port 80 and see if that gets through.

If that doesn't work, your school uses packet filtering, and you should probably just stop here and admit the school has won. If you're still desperate, you need something like HTTP Tunnel Client or if you know of a public SOCKS5 proxy server outside the network, connect to that. Good luck.

[Tyche]

A friend of mine is attending college and can't get around her campus's firewalls to share anything via AIM, Yahoo, etc. Even more, we tried to set us some file sharing through a p2p program, and the firewall restricts her from even connecting to the p2p server at all.

Is there anyway to get around this? I tried to look up some information on proxies, but those just seemed to be for surfing the web, and wouldn't help with file sharing via AIM or any p2p programs.

Which school? USI, UofE? I may be able to help with USI...

[TacoTaru]

She goes to school up state at Ball State. Apparently anything involving file sharing in the least it blocks, even programs like sharepod. The only way we've found to go around it is sending files through email, but it's incredibly long and tedious when sending music since you can only do it three songs at a time.

Bleh this sucks >_>

[Spekkio]

if she has a cable modem or something at home with a box she can leave on there, she could probably set up a VPN connection to there and route her traffic thru there to go out that pipe. not very efficient, but it may work.