Trying to connect to MUSHes through a firewall -- procedure?

[Little Plastic Ninja]

Okay, assume I know nothing about ports and connecting and networking and all that. I never *had* to until now, okay?

So I'm at work. I want to connect to a MUSH -- let's say I want to connect to Elendor. They're at mush.elendor.net:1893. I can also use mush.elendor.net:443.

If I am at home, either one works. If I am at work, I get a timeout on 1893, but 443 works just dandy.

As far as I've been able to figure out, ports with numbers 999 and lower are "outgoing". Ports with numbers 1000 and above are "incoming."

How, then, can I go OUT through port...23, say, of my work server...and go IN through port 1893 of elendor.net? Is there a piece of software that will do this, and if so, what is it and how do I configure it?

Thanks...

[pestie]

First of all, you probably shouldn't be doing this. Those guys at work who set up that firewall probably did so to stop you troublemakers from having any fun.

With that said, let me clear up some things. There are no "outgoing" or "incoming" ports. Port numbers below 1024 are sometimes called "priviliged ports" for historical reasons, but that is an almost meaningless statement unless you're on a UNIX (or UNIX-like) machine. The reason you can get through to port 443 is because the people who configured your firewall at work allow outgoing connections to the web, as you might expect. Web servers usually run on port 80, but encrypted/SSL/secure servers (anything with a URL starting with https:) run on port 443. So they allow outgoing connections to port 443 (and no doubt to port 80 and a few others, too) but deny all other outgoing connections.

The trick to circumventing this is to use a proxy server, but if I explain how to do that the mods may come in here and smite me, and I'd hate for that to happen. Just do some research on Google and you should be able to figure out what to do.