So last weekend at ATP (which was really awesome good time), I was going to pay for a wifi voucher to use the on-site internet access. At £15 for 3 days though I couldn't bring myself to paying that much just for the few hours over the entire 3 days that I'd use it.

After a bit of exploration though I discovered that the sites router would redirect TCP (web/email) traffic to its 'Pay Us Money Now!' signup page, but wasn't blocking or redirecting DNS or ICMP (ping) requests - these were going straight out to the internet.

Annoyingly this meant that I couldn't SSH into my home computer to do this at the time, but I knew there were ways around such measures. Over the weekend I was resigned to streaming videos and music off other peoples iTunes.

So now that I'm back and I've set up not one, but two methods for circumventing this kind of pay-for-access blockage of the internet.

The first is using Ping Tunnel which works but is quite slow (I only managed 100kbit/s or so), but using this client/proxy server combination will get me internet by piggybacking on ICMP ping requests with the real internet sneakily packed inside.

The second, and which is more preffered because of it's speed advantage, is using Ozyman DNS, which packages up real internet and hides it within DNS requests. Again this is a client/server combo where I run the proxy server on my home computer, and then the local client on my laptop would translate for example a SSH connection into DNS and push it out to the internet via my proxy server.

Very nice, and quite clever stuff really.

Also, I love MacPorts for grabbing stuff like this.