Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Limewire Behind the Firewall

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 :-).