How do you get around firewalls on a school system that is cruddy that I can't access my forums but I can access this one....???
Simple version: You can't. Extended version: With things like SSH tunneling and VPN, it might be possible, but I guarantee you you don't have the resources to do either, and as someone who works for a college's IT department and knows the hard work put into network security, if you do circumvent the firewall and get caught, you deserve any punishment you get because the firewalls are there for a reason, and the IT staff didn't bust their balls to setup the necessary software and hardware for a firewall only to have someone think they're a rebel and circumvent them.
Sorry, i just get irritated when people call them 'firewalls' What you're dealing with is a content filter. Not a firewall. www.peacefire.org has a nice mailing list that lets you know of new web proxies. For SSH tunneling you're going to need at least a server of your own. So we're going to rule that out for now. When we did it, we had a rented server out of a datacenter.
you could set up you're own proxy server and do some stuff with SOCKS that is what we did with our college to get around the firewalls.
Or you could read my post about why bypassing filters is bad. Let me just say this: If you have to ask how to do it, then you don't have the resources needed to do it. And Neil, I know they're not called firewalls, I was half asleep when I typed my original post But, it's not too terribly inaccurate. Firewall hardware/software can provide content filtering capabilities, so yes, there can be a firewall, but the more specific term is content filtering. The firewall does much, much more than that..
SOCKS? Todd - Dude, our school has blocked google images for heavensake, how protective do you want a system to be?
Exactly what I mean. If you have to ask, you can't do it. I don't care how protective it is. I don't agree with filters in the first place. But put yourself in your school's IT department's shoes. IT has busted their ass off setting these filters up (these are not cheap nor easy to setup, it's a huge undertaking which I guarantee you took months of planning before any hardware was even purchased). How would you like it if some kids just bypassed all of the work you did. Countless hours of planning. Tediously editing server configuration files. Working with a tangle of wires. Being on call 24/7 in case a server goes down, all for nothing because someone thought it would be cool to break school computing policy and get around a filter. I work for a school's IT department, and believe me. We have some policies like bandwidth restrictions and firewalls to block some incoming ports that I don't like, but I'll uphold those policies 100% because I know the amount of work the higher-ups put in to get those policies in place.
Yeah I do a heap of IT stuff for my school. But this is a forum I am talking about getting into, it's LPA's sister board LPF. If I can access LPA and the Sims 2 Community boards (what can I say? I love the Sims) but I can't access LPF? Isn't that a bit dodgy? It's not the Board of Studies fault, because there are two type of messages you get when trying to access a site: a school based message and a Board of Studies message, which normally occurs when you try to get into hotmail or myspace. I get the school's one when trying to access LPF.
Perhaps they noticed you were wasting so much time on the LPF and decided to block it, considering it's the school filter, not district filter that's blocking it. *shrug*
I managed to get past it one day, by typing in the direct address, but I'm only a noob at this school. That's what I get. At my old school (which was private) I could get onto my boards every day when I wanted. And at my first high school (which was public) there were no blocks on sites like hotmail, only porno and stuff.
My school is private and they block every single freaking thing... even Google Images, which I have needed for school projects before. But we've figured out how to get around that by typing in google.de instead of google.com (I know that doesn't help you with your forum thing, but I wanted to mention it)