My Internet Service Provider, Soul Communications has actually lifted the block on various inbount customer ports.
I’ve been with them for months, and I have no idea when this changed. I was unable to receive incoming connections on ports 80, 443, 25 and a few others. But now they appear to work.
Previously, I had a complicated system going which allowed people visiting the site to type in a url without specifying port 500.
The proxy at school allows traffic to be tunneled through it, but only through port 443 so I can now take advantage of that, which is excellent. In all the schools in the state of New South Wales, every computer connects to the internet through a proxy which now implements a whitelist blocking service – meaning that unless a Department of Education and Training official has entered an approved website into the list, it will be blocked from every school computer in NSW. This is where my website comes in.
I host a cgi script which is a web proxy from my home internet connection. It is password protected, and hidden from view. Any DET official visiting my site will see an informative website about an educational topic. But for students in my year, they simply log into the hidden area with a password that changes every couple of weeks and suddenly they are allowed access to myspace, hotmail etc which are normally denied them while at school : D
Though now, I can host a SSH connection on port 443 and access this through the school’s proxy, and then tunnel proxy traffic over this connection and access blocked websites this way, which works much better and faster than the CGI script.