Everquest, IRC, etc blocked at hospital

[lethdar]

Hi pals, I spend about 10 hours a day in class / working at a hospital. Usually there's a lot of downtime between classes / tutoring sessions so I would love to be able to nerd it out on some eq / irc, however both seem to be blocked here.

Is there anything I can do to connect through this, a VPN? (i know nothing about VPNs, or if this is a silly thing to even suggest), different login ports, pray to lord emperor rogean?

[y2sky2003]

That's due to specific ports being blocked on the hospital's firewall. Nothing P99 or IRC server staff can do about that I'm afraid =/

[lethdar]

Ah, no way of going around it with a VPN or some sort of program like that?

[Striiker]

You could open up a VPN tunnel to somewhere and then access the site that way. One othe rway may be to use software called TOR (The Onion Router) Here (https://www.torproject.org/) is their web page. I played with this before, the idea is that your traffic is encrypted and goes through a series of hops via various TOR routers before being dropped onto the internet unencrypted. I think that this way, you could connect to the IRC server.

[Uaellaen]

i would not recommend that... hospitals usualy have pretty tight security on their networks, installing a VPN without admin consent (wich you prolly never get) is like penetrating theyr network security and can get you into trouble with your hospital ...

but if you dont care about possible consequences for you, VPN is the way to go ;)

[Rogean]

I used to work at a hospital... it sucked, but I eventually got a proxy working via port 443 (or it might have been 53.. https and dns ports respectively).

[Tonomar]

Leth, don't get seal team sixed.

[greatdane]

Legitimate young doctor.

[lethdar]

I care not for consequences pals, can someone point me towards a good VPN?

[cadiz]

Non-standard ports will probably be blocked, so you'd need to have your proxy/tunnel/vpn connection listen on DNS/HTTP/HTTPS ports as Rogean mentioned as those are usually always open (53/UDP, 80/TCP, 443/TCP).

You've got a lot of options, some of them are ::

1) Pay for a VPN service that will allow you to listen on service ports above
2) Setup DD-WRT (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DD-WRT) or Tomato (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tomato_%28firmware%29) on your home Linksys router (assuming its a supported model that can run the OpenVPN build (http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices)and use the OpenVPN features to tunnel your traffic (http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN)
3) If you have access to Linux/UNIX host or shell you can easily setup OpenVPN over an http proxy (http://blog.foppiano.org/2008/07/24/how-to-openvpn-over-proxy/) or you can (even more easily) tunnel everything over SSH/SOCKS proxy (http://www.plenz.com/tunnel-everything)

[mgellan]

... or get a Mifi or tether your phone to the laptop and enjoy unfettered access direct to the net...

Regards,
Mg

[Smedy]

get a vpn tunnel costs around 30$ a month will take traffic over port80 and you also surf anonymously

works with almost all blocked networks