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Bypass Ports for IRC

crazzyeddie

crazzyeddie

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Dec 7, 2002
2,792
1
Florida, USA
My school blocks the use of port 6667 for IRC (because of file sharing, no doubt), but I only want to use it for chat (no DCC, etc...). Ive been looking for some way to get around these ports, like a proxy, but I can't seem to get anything to work. Could someone help me find a way to do this using free internet HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS proxy servers?
 
If you can ssh out of the school's network and you have a machine at home, you can set up a SOCKS proxy on your home machine with ssh, establish an encrypted tunnel between your box at school and your home machine with ssh, and then use your home machine as a secure stepping stone to surf the web/chat/do whatever.

It won't be pretty, it won't be fast, but it will work.
 
ElectricSheep said:
If you can ssh out of the school's network and you have a machine at home, you can set up a SOCKS proxy on your home machine with ssh, establish an encrypted tunnel between your box at school and your home machine with ssh, and then use your home machine as a secure stepping stone to surf the web/chat/do whatever.

It won't be pretty, it won't be fast, but it will work.
Click to expand...

How do I set up a SOCKS proxy on OS X? I'm going to assume that the Mac OS implementation of SSH doesn't include what I need, so I'll need to download an app.

And speed shouldn't be an issue... increased lag times, etc, shouldn't be a problem with IRC-only. But how can I route only port 6667 through that proxy? If I create a SOCKS proxy, wouldn't that route everything through home?
 
You could try ssh tunneling, to forward port 6667 on your local computer to a remote server on port 6667.
But most irc networks have a few servers who allow connections on port 8080 for example. You might try that also.
 
jpeeters said:
You could try ssh tunneling, to forward port 6667 on your local computer to a remote server on port 6667.
But most irc networks have a few servers who allow connections on port 8080 for example. You might try that also.
Click to expand...

I tried setting that up last night but I couldn't manage to get it. How would I go about accomplishing this, as it sounds like a much better solution than using a SOCKS proxy.
 
[/LIST]
crazzyeddie said:
How do I set up a SOCKS proxy on OS X? I'm going to assume that the Mac OS implementation of SSH doesn't include what I need, so I'll need to download an app.

And speed shouldn't be an issue... increased lag times, etc, shouldn't be a problem with IRC-only. But how can I route only port 6667 through that proxy? If I create a SOCKS proxy, wouldn't that route everything through home?
Click to expand...

Actually, as of MacOS 10.4, the standard installation of ssh supports running sshd as a SOCKS5 proxy.

Its very, very easy to do. On your Home machine, make sure your router/firewall is set up so that you can actually ssh in remotely. I won't go over that here, but if you cannot ssh into your home box from the outside, none of this will work. Its also a good idea to set up some kind of Dynamic DNS service so that you have an easy to remember hostname to connect to.


While you are at school, run SSH with the following options:

ssh -D [local port] [user@home.machine.domain]

For example, [local port] could be 2001, and [user@home.machine.domain] could be esheep@mybox.com.

You now have a SOCKS5 proxy running on machine at school that will automatically forward (via an encrypted ssh tunnel) TCP/IP connections to your machine at home. Your machine at home will then forward those requests to the internet, and then send things back via the encrypted ssh tunnel to your machine at school.

To use the SOCKS5 proxy your just set up, simply configure your favorite IRC client to point to 127.0.0.1:[local port].
 
Wow, thats pretty amazing. Thank you for your help. I'm assuming that would work the same for a free SSH proxy?

And, how do you turn it off once on a normal connection?
 
Also, if I want to point port xxxx to connect to specific IRC server, how do I do that? On this end, the IRC server address would be localhost:6667, but how do i make it then connect to irc.blah.com:6667?

Edit: nevermind, I just had to tell the IRC client to use the SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, but keep the server address the same. Thanks :)
 
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