Maniacally Restrictive Firewalls

Maniacally Restrictive Firewalls

I did encounter one wrinkle when trying to SSH out from behind the firewall at, er, the Fifth State Bank of Refuse. They did allow machines inside to connect to machines on the outside, but not from ports on the inside below 1024. I'm not exactly sure why, but openSSH likes to use ports below 1024 (if anyone can tell me why, I'd like to hear it). I beat my head against a brick wall for a long time trying to figure out why. Then I actually RTFM'd. There it was: UsePrivilegedPort. Once I set that to "no," through I went ”well, almost. Turns out they would only allow me to connect to ports 21, 23, 25, 80, and 149 on the outside. So I used the Port option on my server side to run SSHD on port 21. (I felt this was a good choice since I would no longer need FTP service if I had SSH).