Port forwarding/Opening on a LAN

[Andeh13]

Im at university accomodation and i get my internet through an LAN system, the powers at be(management *bites tongue*) thought it wise to crack down on the avaliable ports. As a result torrents etc dont work, fair enough on blocking due to legality issues, but a lot of the updates/patches i download come via torrents and these get blocked aswell. Speaking to them they just say say its all open and theres nothing they can do.

Is there anything i can do to open a few of these ports? A crowbar to the server/managment team came to mind but it seems to easy, and im probably failing to see the downside to it.

A mate suggested setting the dl progrms to use the same ports that MSN etc use, sounds right in theory but i couldnt get it to work. Anyone have any advice on this?

cheers guys.

[shaithis]

No real solutions that I am aware of, else there would be little security from actually doing port-blocking if you could work around it. The only exception is tunnelling but i believe you would need a PC running 24/7 outside of your university network to get that to work.

Unless you can get the source to send you the torrent on port 80 or 21, but that isn't going to happen.


If they say its all open, are you assuming they have cracked down on blacked ports? Were your torrents previously working? Or could this be a configuration issue your end?

What updates do you legitimately receive via torrent? (Only one I can think of is WoW and people always keep HTTP/FTP mirrors which are faster to download from then the official torrent anyway)

[Lee H]

Nope - there's not much you can really do apart from telling your client to encrypt the data and changing the default port on the software.

[Splash]

Best piece of advice I can give - get friendly with a network admin. Alcohol is your friend!

Seriously, while you could do some investigating to find ways around it you _will_ get found out. If/when this happens the consequences could be pretty harsh.

In terms of game updates which games are we talking about? You can grab the WoW patches from HTTP mirrors anyways, and I would imagine this is possible with most others too.

Also you mention blocking torrents to cover themselves legally, has it occurred to you that they don't have infinite bandwidth? Think about it - just about everyone knows of bittorrent these days so think of the way the network would be swamped if these things weren't managed...

[directhex]

it's a reasonable suggestion that may work, depending on how their filtering works

be aware that the main reason torrents are verboten on university networks isn't the legality, it's the risk of devouring the university's backbone and great-wide-world internet link with torrent seeding

any torrent client should allow you to set the ports it uses (1 port per active torrent required, try 1863 as the msn port, which will obviously prevent msn from working)

[Andeh13]

heh, was hoping you wouldnt pick at my 'game patches' cover story.

My accomodation isnt run by the university, its run by a private company - Liberty, as a result i miss out on the free university provided internet/LAN and all the goodies that go with it(internal p2p network, average dl speed 800-1000kb/s - ie a film in a few mins. Looks like ill have to make do with getting them off mates via DVDs, ah well, cant knock it too much.

Cheers anyway guys.

[MadduckUK]

sorry wrong thread