Is there any software for bypassing the firewall?

Question

I am using ubuntu 10.04. Is there any software to bypass the firewall configured by my network administrator. I have seen my friend using software named ultrasurf in windows which bypasses the firewll, masks it's IP, can able to surf anonymously etc ...Is there any equivalent software available in ubuntu?

Answer 1

First, your best bet is to approach the school administration and explain your position. Your desire to view videos on YouTube relevant to your studies is a good thing. Downloading Ubuntu ISOs might be made simpler if a copy is cached locally, only the university admins could do something like that. You don't know if you don't ask.

A 'quick and dirty' solution is to set up SSH tunneling to a proxy server, there are paid and free options. This isn't really an Ubuntu question though. Maybe you could re-post another question about setting up SSH tunnels in Ubuntu? That would be welcome here. From there, you are on your own selecting a proxy, there are too many to cover here. Your question may get closed as off-topic but don't get discouraged by that. This is a community site and everything is shaped by various members of the community. Just stay on-topic to Ubuntu and read the FAQs on questions.

Don't ever be afraid to ask questions here and at school.

Answer 2

Preamble

If your school puts up regulations on what you can see, bypassing that will likely get you in trouble. Even if you're not breaking the law, you'll probably be breaking policy which is probably worse if you want to finish your studies and leave with a good record.

And don't think you can't be caught. You can. Firewall monitoring tools make it quite easy to log suspicious traffic from a workstation and getting you name from that information isn't hard either.

If you think getting caught will hurt you in any way, get permission. If you don't get permission, don't do it. Use your own network connection.

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Ultrasurf is a simple combination of two elements:

• A proxy service
• History cleaning

Of course they dress these up as major things (because they have a product they're pushing) but the fact is you can achieve this relatively simply from Ubuntu without downloading anything.

The first step is getting proxy access. You can use Tor, a paid-for service or something else but the easiest method is just to SSH back home.

Unless you have a static IP, you'll want to set up a domain name (with DynDNS or one of the thousands of other dynamic-DNS services out there), install OpenSSH server and then let your router point that port at your computer. I'm not going to cover the set up here because it's been done a thousand times before. By the end of this you should be able to SSH home from outside your home network.

Then when you're at school you SSH home using something like this:

ssh -D 8080 username@mh-home-server.dyndns.com

This sets up a SOCKS proxy running on localhost:8080. Magic. To use this in Firefox, you need to go into the settings and set the proxy.

The next step is keeping your history clear. Modern browsers can do this for you by using their private browsing mode. There are also plugins that can do similar things - but I think the private browsing mode should be enough.

If you have access to Chrome/Chromium you can minify the settings by just running this:

chromium-browser --incognito --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:8080" --user-data-dir=/tmp/temp-profile

You can script or alias that away to make launching it easier.