Okay, so at home I used to play Starcraft. I had DSL so I had to set up port forwarding, but beyond that it was pretty easy. I still have a computer back home that I can connect to.

Now I'm at this university, and they've got a firewall. Not only that, but I'm sharing an external IP address with a whole bunch of other people and it's a real bitch. For example, I'm having to use a proxy right now because apparently someone got the shared IP address banned from Totse. Either that or the network admins decided to block us from viewing the site, and I wouldn't put it past them.

The ports required to play Starcraft and several other Battle.net games are 4000, 6112-6119, both TCP and UDP. In particular, this one Blizzard page says Starcraft requires port 6112 TCP and UDP, both in and out.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21109&rhtml=true?rhtml=y

I get the feeling that these ports are being blocked outward as well as incoming, because when I tried to connect to Battle.net in both Starcraft and Diablo 2 it said there was no connection to Battle.net. Actually, in the most recent Starcraft patch it just quits without an error message.

So, first question: How can I tell which ports are blocked outgoing? I already know that they're blocked incoming because there's no port forwarding to my computer.

Anyway, my idea is this: I can make a connection to my computer at home on unblocked ports. My home computer can have port forwarding enabled for Starcraft (in fact, it already does). The channel of communication would need to be like so:

University PC <--------> Home PC <--------> Battle.net and other gamers

I need to somehow tell this university computer to send the data for port 6112 to my home computer on an unblocked port (maybe 443) and from there to whatever IP address Starcraft had intended it to go to. My home computer would also need to be able to accept connections on TCP/UDP 6112 from various sources and redirect them to the university computer across the unblocked port.

It sounds like something that wouldn't be impossible, but I do not know how to implement it. I have looked at SSH and VPN, but figuring out how to set them up has been difficult. I have set up WASTE with other computers out on the Internet from the university, so I know it's possible to get past some of the problems with NAT.

Help? I don't know much about this stuff, so you'll need to be descriptive.

edit: I forgot to mention the operating systems I'm using. This university PC is running Windows 2000, the other is using XP Home Edition.

edit2:http://i36.tinypic.com/25jxljd.png

Install GNU/Linux on a machine at home and set up an SSH server. Read the manual for ssh(1). Set up forwarding through that.

Install GNU/Linux on a machine at home and set up an SSH server. Read the manual for ssh(1). Set up forwarding through that.

Meh... let me try asking some direct questions.

Can the SSH server actively accept new connections from outside, like from the other gamers, and redirect them through the pre-existing SSH tunnel? Because the computer at home won't be able to initiate any connections with the one at the university.

Also, I don't know if I can redirect Starcraft's connections by just using SSH. I mean, is the SSH client able to intercept the data the game is trying to send and instead put it into the SSH tunnel? I was reading about how you use SSH for e-mail and it said you had to change some settings in the e-mail client itself (change the remote machine to localhost). I can't do that with Starcraft.

edit: also, I still need to find out which ports are blocked outgoing. The online scanners I've tried so far only check incoming connections.

Meh... let me try asking some direct questions.

Can the SSH server actively accept new connections from outside, like from the other gamers, and redirect them through the pre-existing SSH tunnel? Because the computer at home won't be able to initiate any connections with the one at the university.

Also, I don't know if I can redirect Starcraft's connections by just using SSH. I mean, is the SSH client able to intercept the data the game is trying to send and instead put it into the SSH tunnel? I was reading about how you use SSH for e-mail and it said you had to change some settings in the e-mail client itself (change the remote machine to localhost). I can't do that with Starcraft.

edit: also, I still need to find out which ports are blocked outgoing. The online scanners I've tried so far only check incoming connections.

You probably can do that with starcraft, and yes, that's what a tunnel does. :)

Your responses aren't really that helpful, but thanks for telling me it might be possible.

Your responses aren't really that helpful, but thanks for telling me it might be possible.

It will be a bit difficult to grok at first, but if you do set up an ssh server and read the ssh manual, it'll be really easy.

(Seriously, it's one command to do in the end.)

Alright... I'm home for the week, so I'm going to try to hurry and figure it out.

Well, I can see some openSSH switches that look like they are appropriate: -L, -R, and -D. However, SSH does not tunnel UDP traffic, which is required for Starcraft. So I'm going to be looking for a solution, or maybe look towards VPN again.

edit: people seem to be running into trouble with a workaround to put UDP into TCP and then tunneling, so I'm going to use VPN instead. Wish me luck.