I am not sure this is the best forum for this question, but I figured I would give it a try. I have a custom system/application that involves communication between two machines across the internet via a socket. Normally, I have complete control over the networks at both endpoints. I can set up the networks at either end to forward the correct ports to the correct machines so that this socket connection works. Now suppose I want to travel and I am in a hotel offering internet access. What I would like to do is set up a socket between my laptop at the hotel and one of the endpoint machines talked about in the previous paragraph. However, I have no control over the network at the hotel. I can send packets from the hotel to the other machine, but all packets sent from the external machine back into the hotel get blocked. I know that the hotel must leave some ports open for two-way communication, such as port 80 for web browsing. It seems like there has to be a way to con the hotel network into allowing these incoming packets to get back to my laptop. I have tried doing searches on this topic but I can't quite find what I am looking for on Google or I don't know the keywords I should be searching for. If anyone has any suggestions or experience with this type of situation I would be grateful if you could provide advice or even a link somewhere to get me started.
if you can do what you want it to do then doesn't it mean the hotel would have to turn off its firewall?
Right. Are there ways to get around firewalls at hotels without asking them to turn the firewall off (which they won't)? The only reason I am hopeful is because when you are web browsing you are sending out requests through (probably) port 80 at the hotel and you are receiving back replies somehow. Is there a way I can piggyback that?
socket? remind me of dial-up day when I had to hunt around for good socket software, is this what you need? http://www.sharewareriver.com/products/16860.htm
Off the top of my head i think you can do what you want through an HTTP tunnel. There are a couple of companies that would let you do that. http://www.http-tunnel.com/html/solutions/http_tunnel/client.asp - The New Guy
Thank you - "HTTP tunnel" was the hint I needed. I think I am going to try some Gnu licensed software first: http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html
Thanks. Did a little more research and came up with this link: http://sebsauvage.net/punching/ So SSH inside of httptunnel.