When won't this work?

Please notice the title of this page starts "How To Bypass Most Firewall Restrictions... I say most because the method I describe here will not work for everyone, even if you meet the pre-requisites above. If any of the following are true for you, you probably can't use this method successfully;

• You can not access any external Internet websites; only internal websites or none at all.
• You can access a few specific Internet websites, but no others at all.

If either of the 2 lines above apply to you, your network administrator is working hard because they are using a "pessimistic" blocking strategy. In other words, they have decided to block everything, and probably only allow specific access. The problem with that strategy however, is that it requires much more work and maintenance than using an "optimistic" strategy, in which they allow access to everything and block only certain "things".

The method I describe on this page will not work with a pessimistic blocking strategy because it depends on being able to access your home computer from work. 9 times of 10, if you can't get to www.amazon.com, you won't be able to your home computer either. If for some reason you CAN access your home computer, then great.. proceed If not, you may want to talk to your network administrator. Ask him if they would punch a hole in the firewall so you can SSH to your computer at home. Or come up with some excuse to get access to 1 port on your home computer, then run the SSH server on that port.

Or... maybe you ARE the network administrator and are just curious about how this works. :)