1.1. DISCLAIMER

READ THIS IMPORTANT SECTION !!!

I hereby disclaim all responsibility for your use of this hack. If it backfires on you in any way whatsoever, that's the breaks. Not my fault. If you don't understand the risks inherent in doing this, don't do it. If you use this hack and it allows vicious vandals to break into your company's computers and costs you your job and your company millions of dollars, well that's just tough nuggies. Don't come crying to me.

1.2. Legal Blurp

Copyright © 1998-2001 by François-René Rideau.

This document is free software published under the bugroff license.

To ease their task, it has also been released to the LDP maintainers under the GNU Free Documentation License.

1.3. Looking for a maintainer

I have stopped actively developing this mini-HOWTO, although I'm still maintaining it. I'm looking for a maintainer to take over this document, who would extend it into a full-fledged HOWTO by expanding on the solutions whose existence I only mention, and who would maybe develop software to make it easier to pierce firewalls. I have a lot of ideas to expand this HOWTO and write according software, if anyone is interested. I also used to write a french version of this HOWTO, but no one has been maintaining it anymore for a long time.

1.4. Credits

Even though the only thing left is the disclaimers, this document owes a lot to the Term-Firewall mini-HOWTO by Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>. Barak's mini-HOWTO relies on an ancient and no-more-supported program named Term (a great program in its time, and maybe still useful in some unhappy circumstances), as well as on peculiarities of a not-so-standard telnet implementation, that is, many obsolete and non-portable facts. Nevertheless, there was a necessity for a mini-HOWTO about piercing firewalls, and despite the limitations of its hacks, this mini-HOWTO was a model and an encouragement.

I'd also like to congratulate Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> and Magnus Lundström <logic@gore.nocrew.org> for their fine http, mail and icmp tunnels.

1.5. Latest versions

The latest official LDP version of this document is on: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Firewall-Piercing.html

The source of my latest official version of this document is on: http://fare.tunes.org/files/fwprc/

The source of my latest working draft of this document is on: http://tunes.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/fare/fare/www/articles/Firewall-Piercing.en.sgml