Getting PlaceShifter working through a company fire wall

[motobarsteward]

I use Vonage Voice over IP telephony. They sent me a Dlink access point when my old Linksys one died. I had the devils own job trying to get port forwarding to work. It turned out that there is a firmware issue in the Dlink box that stops you do 'custom' forwards. I gave up and went and bought a linksys WRT54GS

[Osoksniper]

So you enabled port 443 on your local router at your home? There was some concern about security on multiple ports in another thread here, are you still getting the sign on and, how did you enable? In a range or in just the one external or both external and internal on your home router? Just wondering.

[wvpolekat]

Since my day job is part of the internet police at a Fortune 100 company, let me lend some friendly advice here and add some comments.

"I am now streaming at 300kb/sec" I assure you that they will notice that a (probably large) chunk of their newly bought bandwidth is being eaten up and will figure out why. Bandwidth isn't cheap and they won't be nice about someone abusing it.

All of the ideas given sofar are standard methods of dodging a proxy/firewall and WILL get discovered. Unless you work someplace mom and pop, or are buddies with the right people, the outcome will not be good for your career.

Believe me, I see cases every day of people who fall into the category of "Too Stupid To Work Here". 99% of the time, it is either over porn or copyrighted material. Both of these are taken VERY seriously and delt with VERY harshly. They will NOT care that you were streaming something from your house under "fair use", they will see it as abuse of company resources for personal use and possible copyright infringement.

If you work somewhere that is cool with you doing this, then great. But, if you are actively taking steps to bypass the firewall, you are taking your career in your own hands, particularly when you are doing this to suck up large amounts of expensive bandwidth.

[hemicuda]

very true. and usually the company is getting screwed by the bandwidth provider just because they are a biz account. it's crazy the differences I've seen in how some ISP's price res vs. biz services.

[motobarsteward]

I feel I have to comment on the 'internet police' posting!

Yes, we all sign a 'fair use' agreement that allows limited, personal use during our breaks. Generally, companies are ok with private useage provided that it does not interfere with the user or companies operations. I don't use it very often from work and if I had any indication that it was effecting the company, I would stop. I can say, for one, that I don't recall ever going to an IT department and not seeing at least one of the people there listening to stream internet radio or using i-Tunes.

So, a general rule, if you are not happy to demonstrate sage to your boss or the company chairman (I have done both) then don't use sage at work.

[wvpolekat]

With us, the term is "reasonable personal use", basically the same thing. But, reasonable is a bit of a gray area and for us a big portion of that is where you are physically and the bandwidth available to that site. Right now we are looking at purchasing more capacity for a site, and one of the first steps in that is looking at top talkers to figure out of there is any "low hanging fruit" we can trim off to make better use of the currently available bandwidth before spending money on new capacity. So, a smaller site that may have a smaller pipe will get much more scrutiny than sites with thousands of users and monster connections.

For almost all ISPs and businesses 90% of the bandwidth is used by 10% of the people. In the case of the business, they just want to make sure that 90% of their bandwidth is not being used for someone watching the last episode of American Idiot or whatever.

But, I do like your gauge, if you aren't willing to show the boss what you are doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

[rickgillyon]

Maybe of interest to someone here (probably not )

I'd failed to get through the company firewall on 8080, 443, 22 and 53. Really annoying, was tunnelling through 80, but very slow. I had other issues which I attributed to my ISP, i.e. I would lose my inward connectivity on 80 from time to time, a reboot of the router would bring it back (although the 20-second walk to my office would annoy the wife!). If I waited long enough it would come back on its own.

Anyway, I got sick of this so decided to swap out my Netgear router. Got a D-Link instead, and it seems to have fixed my periodic connection problems. Thought I'd try the above ports again from work, now all of them are working, so clearly the problem was with the (almost new) router after all. Grrr...

[motobarsteward]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

...
I'd failed to get through the company firewall on 8080, 443, 22 and 53. ... Grrr...

I guess your company are running through a proxy. You need to find out which port they proxy 443 through. For example, in my old Motorola days, they ran port 80 through port 1080. I don't remember what port they proxied 443 through but that would only be half your problem. If your company requires authentication to get through the fire wall then you are stumped until Sage give us proxy support. Otherwise, work out what port they have proxied 443 through and specify that port when you create the placeshifter connection. You can find the port that they have proxied through by opening I.E. Tools-Internet Options-Connections Tab-Lan Settings. Click the advanced button. Your ports should be in there.

I apologise if you already know this rickgillion, but there may be others that don't.

[rickgillyon]

You should have read the rest of my message!
Problem was my router, not the proxy...