[admin] faq entry for shell.common-lisp.net

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi,

Some of that FAQ entry was inspired by
<URL:http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6841&group_id=1>.
Right. Draft and brain dump mode on:

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Q: How can I connect to common-lisp.net through a restrictive firewall via ssh?

A: Some firewall administrators are paranoid enough to disallow
outgoing connections to the ssh port, but they often allow connections
to e.g. the https port. For these cases, we have SSH running on
non-standard ports on shell.common-lisp.net. The https port is the
most common one that is left open, but sometimes others are open,
too. So ssh on shell.common-lisp.net accepts connections to ports 21
(ftp), 22 (ssh), 23 (telnet), 80 (www) and 443 (https).

To find out which ports your firewall lets through, Try to connect to
the ports in order:

telnet shell.common-lisp.net 21
telnet shell.common-lisp.net 22
telnet shell.common-lisp.net 23
telnet shell.common-lisp.net 80
telnet shell.common-lisp.net 443

If a port is blocked by the firewall, you'll see something like this:

$ telnet shell.common-lisp.net 443
Trying 86.59.21.101...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

The error message may differ, depending on the firewall's
configuration.

If you can connect to a port, you'll see something similar to this:

$ telnet shell.common-lisp.net 443
Trying 86.59.21.101...                 
Connected to shell.common-lisp.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.8.1p1 Debian-8.sarge.4

If you found a port number that works for you, put the following
segment in the ~/.ssh/config file and substitute the port that you
found:

Host common-lisp.net
     Port 443   # substitute the port number you found for 443.
     HostName shell.common-lisp.net

If none of the ports on shell.common-lisp.net work for you, but you
can connect to https web sites, you may be running behind a
transparent https proxy. In that case, software like corkscrew
(http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/) may help you connect to
common-lisp.net.

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Now, to get Joerg Hoehle an account (:

Cheers,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, (http://|im:asf@|mailto:asf@)boinkor.net, antifuchs