[kwlug-disc] Getting around firewalls

[Keefer Rourke]

For some strange reason, I've found high school institutions to be
*extremely* *NIX-phobic. And they, or at least my particular school, seem
to be becoming increasingly so. Previously I had only noticed firewalls in
place which block all traffic from major Linux package managers like apt
and yum, though this never affected me as I've never had an issue updating
my Arch Linux installation while on the school network.

However, things appear to have changed as SSH connections are now also
blocked. Before the winter holidays I could use secure shell at school to
my heart's content, but now that people in my computer engineering class
are beginning to use it more often so they can remotely connect to their
headless Raspberry Pis (with which we're supposed to be controlling
robots), the protocol has conveniently stopped working (I'm guess the board
discovered this "unusual" traffic and decided to block it). I now find
myself needing a way to get around this problem, or my summative project
will have come to an effective halt.

As a suggested work-around, I tried changing the default port on the host
(the pi) from 22, to 443, and establishing a connection to that port from
my laptop, but the connection still times out after a few minutes. I'm
wondering if, either I'm doing something wrong with the port configurations
(though the verbose output from SSH would suggest otherwise), or if there
is another solution to getting around the WRDSB's apparent hatred of free
technology.

My teacher suggested that we create a subnetwork between the two machines,
which I will try today, but if there are any alternative solutions, I'd
love to know of them. Anyone else run into problems like this?

-- 
Cheers,
Keefer
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