Most of the ports blocked, 80 open, will VPN be my savior?

5

My friend is on an uni where most of the ports are blocked so he can't even play games online, 80 is open obviously. The idea is "I will set up VPN tunnel on :80 on my router, so you should be able to connect to it and we can happily play again".

Now I wonder how much is this likely to fly...? What are the potential/usual obstacles here? (Besides the fact that I get annoying warning messages in the log.) Is it safe to say that when my friend can reach my webserver the VPN will work as well?

Jaroslav Záruba

Posted 2012-10-07T12:42:23.360

Reputation: 718

Answers

6

Two problems:

  1. The additional latency added by the VPN may still prevent online game playing (e.g. all traffic will have to go to your home, thorough VPN, and then back to the Internet).

  2. The university may have deep packet inspection firewall, or transparent proxy, on outgoing port 80 traffic, which could prevent VPN traffic on port 80. On top of it, any additional filtering at the university will add more latency...

Otherwise, don't see a reason why it wouldn't work. Common port numbers are just a convention, if you can configure a software to use an alternative port, it should work.

haimg

Posted 2012-10-07T12:42:23.360

Reputation: 19 503

Thank you, stuff mentioned in [2] is has been what I'm worried about. Will try to give it a shot, we will see. – Jaroslav Záruba – 2012-10-07T13:41:13.303

1The deep packet inspection might be circumvented if you use a VPN or some other software that tunnels traffic over HTTP (HTTPS is better - 443 should be open as well). – LawrenceC – 2012-10-07T14:36:48.167

Thanks ultra, I heard of HTTP tunneling obviously, but I assumed it just means "accessing VPN via 80/443". :) I will look into it. – Jaroslav Záruba – 2012-10-08T08:55:32.493

Asked: 2012-10-07T12:42:23.360

Viewed: 13 920 times

Active: 2012-10-07T12:54:25.467