The sys admin's daily grind: Httptunnel

Pierced Walls

Article from Issue 107/2009
Author(s):

Just a couple of hours after completing this article, Charly headed off on vacation. Before he left, he indulged in a spot of piercing to help him work around the paranoid firewalls waiting for him in the Internet cafes at his holiday location.

As a country boy, the first time I saw body piercing was in the nose of my grandfather's prize bull, long before people started to disfigure their faces and secondary sexual organs with bits of metal. Firewall piercing – setup tricks that route arbitrary TCP traffic through an existing hole such as HTTP(S) – started to become popular in the epoch between rings in bulls' noses and perforated humans, or about the time SUSE 5.3 was released.

Httptunnel [1], which I will be using on vacation, dates back to the same period. Although today, admins could replace the tool with just a couple of iptables lines, it has always been more user friendly, and it is available out of the box with most distributions.

A journey of approximately 12 hours will take me to Occitania [2], an area full of friendly people, beautiful landscapes, and Internet cafes, in which network access means strictly HTTP. Unfortunately, I was planning to publish the events of the international jellyfish-throwing contest, which is held in Occitania on IRC; in other words, I need SSH.

[...]

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