Despite my Uni being pretty liberal (read “utterly relaxed”) about permitted ports and programs, the firewall for the residential network here blocks most of the common ports used for P2P filesharing programs, restricting usage to internal sharing, unless cunning tricks are employed. SSH to the rescue however (and this is another great benefit of keeping a server or two at home) - Limewire works just fine through an SSH tunnel.

All that’s necessary is to use the “Dynamic” (SOCKS proxy) tunnel setting of an SSH client like PuTTY on a port of your choice, say 1234, then instruct Limewire to use a proxy server at 127.0.0.1, port 1234. Provided your SSH server allows tunneling, you should have no problem using Limewire, but the download/upload speeds you’ll get will of course be limited by the connection your SSH server is on.

I tried doing a similar thing with Azureus, my BitTorrent client of choice, but that didn’t work out. However, I would imagine that other P2P clients such as Kazaa (*puke*), eDonkey etc. would work fine.

Disclaimer: Downloading and/or sharing copyrighted files remains illegal in most countries, so don’t even think about doing it. Not ever.

And no, I won’t give you a shell account on my box :-).