Tunneling through SSH for IRC?

[Tayl]

Alright, quick overview. My school says that they "block all common IRC ports". So I thought "Cool. I can beat this." and installed an IRC Proxy(ezbounce) on a Slackware 9 server I run at home. I had others outside my network test it, and it worked.

Alright, so fast forward to me at school. I set up my PC, and when things get settled down, I boot up Klient, and try to connect to my proxy. Nothing. It connects, but immediately disconnects. So I try a few more IRC Proxies to make sure it isn't the program screwing me, but I get the same error everytime. So after some digging, I find out that my school blocks all IRC packets as well, so I can't even send out IRC packets to a proxy server on a different port than 6667.

So I fell back on my stand-by: Using an SSH program(SecureCRT or Putty) to connect to my Linux server, and then loading up BitchX(a text-based client). It works well, I still get IRC, but it's all text-based, so it kinda still sucks.

Anyways, someone on IRC told me that it should be possible to somehow tunnel my irc connection through SSH, so that my school wouldn't catch it. Is something like this possible?

[elec999]

lol, why you need mirc at school?
hoenstly to need

[strangerstill]

OK, easy enough.

SSH tunnelling works like this: the SSH client opens a port on the client machine, and connects that through the SSH tunnel to a machine accessible by the server.

Then, a program running on the client side can connect to the open port, and it will behave as if it is connected to the machine on the server side:

program -> client: port -> (SSH tunnel) -> SSH server -> target: port

You can also set up a SSH tunnel in the opposite direction (for running a server on the SSH client machine) but that's used less often.

Instructions: in the Putty options box, set up a port forwarding, connect local port 6667 to 'localhost:6667' on the server side (I'm assuming your SSH server is also your IRC proxy server!)

Then connect your IRC client to 'localhost:6667' and it will get forwarded to 'localhost:6667' on the server, i.e. the IRC proxy server.

Oh, and don't do this if it would constitute an illegal act or a breach of service contract, explicit or implied. If it could get misconstrued as such an act, don't get caught.

sorry the school has set up the policies. we do not explain how to get around a network setup. talk to the network admin if you have a problem with it