Tunneling PKPN

If you want to listen to PKPN, normally you have to be able to establish a TCP connection to port 7778. Your network administrators may have a firewall in place, though, that restricts network traffic to only a select few ports such as port 80 (normal HTTP) and port 22 (SSH). There are ways to work around this.

SOCKS proxy

If your network administrators provide you with access to a SOCKS proxy server, you can use it as a gateway for your PKPN traffic. Your media player may have SOCKS support built-in. Configure and use that support if you can. You usually just need to tell it what host on the local network has the SOCKS proxy server, and what version of SOCKS to use. You might also have to tell it to use the proxy to resolve hostnames (e.g., so your media player can look up kapow.skew.org; your regular DNS server might not know about Internet domains).

If your media player doesn't have its own SOCKS proxy support, you can instead run the application "socksified" via a wrapper such as SocksCap.

In any case, you should be able to connect to PKPN as normal, once you have the media player configured to use the proxy.

HTTP CONNECT tunnel

CONNECT is one of the HTTP commands but is not as common as GET and POST. It's normally used to request that the current connection become a gateway to port 443 (HTTPS) on the same host, but some web servers can be configured to allow the request port to be used to access any other port, possibly on any other machine. PKPN's web server, for example, is configured to allow the port 80 to be used as a CONNECT-based tunnel to port 7778 this way. (Webmasters: Here are instructions on how to set that up in Apache.)

Using a CONNECT-based proxy is an option for you if you can surf the Web through your firewall (i.e., you can connect to Internet hosts on port 80). It's very unlikely that your media player supports CONNECT natively, so you'll also have to be able to install and run your own special proxy server.

Windows users can download and install HTTPort 3.SNFM (it's free & safe; info page is at htthost.com) and set it up as follows:

Then press the Start button in the bottom right corner of the Proxy pane. Now, instead of pointing your media player to port 7778 of kapow.skew.org, point it to localhost port 57778; e.g., http://localhost:57778/

 

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