Tent v0.1 released

Posted Sep 29, 2012 10:29 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
In reply to: Tent v0.1 released by geofft
Parent article: Tent v0.1 released

> No, they don't. Most ISPs filter block 25 in both directions, and many block IRC since it's used for botnet coordination. Have you tried it (on an ISP that is commonly used by the technically uninformed majority)?

I'm using the biggest ISP in my country, obviously the commonly used one by the technically uninformed majority. Of course it doesn't filter any ports, doing so would create very bad PR and loss of many customers. Are there really major ISPs filtering? How can such customer-screwing ISPs remain in business outside of a niche-market?

Tent v0.1 released

Posted Sep 29, 2012 10:38 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Filtering is, alas, almost ubiquitous in the UK: you have to go to specialist ISPs to find ones that let you get unfiltered access, and even *they* egress-filter port 25 because if they didn't worm-infested Windows boxes would lead to their entire netblock being blacklisted.

My sister's using an ISP that explicitly egress-filters and bans everything other than HTTP and SSL in its almost-impossible-to-find terms of service (email? use webmail), and transparent-proxies the HTTP and HTTPS over some sort of carrier-grade NAT horror that drops all connections after half a minute or so on the assumption that a web browser will immediately re-initate it and no other application matters. She's happy with it, but when I go there there's no way I can ride an SSH connection over a TCP link that unreliable, not even with proxytunnel.

(I'll admit I'm wondering about some sort of interstitial thing that would make an intermittent TCP connection appear like a constant one, re-establishing where necessary, making this sort of thing work again. Unfortunately the client end would almost certainly have to work on Windows because most systems I encounter when travelling run Windows, and that is beyond my sphere of expertise.)