SSH Rocks My World

You may recall the misadventures I had with the JMU IT Department back in March regarding their newly institued policy of not allowing any SMTP traffic into or out of campus (by blocking port 25 at the router level). I've lived with the policy ever since I was unable to get a hold of the higher-ups in the department, content to lurk on my myriad mailing lists. Over the weekend, I got the idea to write the administrator at Datahaven Project, my email provider, and see if they'd be willing to open up another port for me to use.

Expectedly, he shot down the idea, but he did give me a hint on how to solve the problem. "Run SSH on your machine and tunnel your SMTP traffic through that." I'm not entirely a networking novice, but I was unsure of how to accomplish it. Happily, he also provided me with the command necessary to accomplish it, and I tweaked it to my liking. I may now tunnel my SMTP traffic through SSH to the DHP server and circumvent the draconian policies of my favorite university. I win!

April 23, 2002 - 10:03 AM