Some people have told me it's possible but I've never tried on ports other than 80. Just watch out for Cablevision. I've already gotten two phone calls from them on how I can't run any servers. Yes, that's right, ANY. No Web, FTP, Mail, File Sharing. Ridiculous, eh?

OptOnline BLOCKS port 80 from outside your node. I run an FTP server which doesn't get hit very much, and sofar haven't had any problems with them. They also block 25 and 110, but if you have someone nmap your IP, it shows *everything* under the sun open and waiting. I think it's their filters, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, you can sign up for a free DynDNS service and run your httpd on any port you want, and have it redirected from the DynDNS service so it appears as though your server isn't being run from the back of your car so to speak.

I've also setup DNS to resolve one of my domains using their DNS servers to my local web/FTP servers, and sofar it doesn't work. *sigh*

Not true. OptOnline only blocks incoming TCP port 80.

What does that mean? You can not run a web server on the standard port.

Many protocols have default ports, HTTP is 80, FTP is 21, POP3 is 110, etc. In your web browser, when you type http://whatever.com, it connects to whatever.com's servers on port 80. The only way to modify this behavior is to append a :portno to the url, so http://whatever.com:240 would connect to whatever.com's servers on port 240.

A new type or redirector service which was refered to above, runs on an internet connection with an unblocked port 80 and puts your page in a frame in the browser (that fills the screen).

Here is an example: You run a webserver at 24.12.21.36 (made up IP addr) on port 81. You setup this special forwarding at a DNS provider (not all support this, because this is not a standard thing for DNS, its actually extra) to forward the url http://testsite.no-ip.com to http://24.12.21.36:81. When you go to http://testsite.no-ip.com, the dns provider (in this case, No-IP) sends you a page from their webserver with a frame taking up 100% of the page to the url of your site.

While this is useful, in many cases it has a lot of disadvantages. the actual domain does not resolve to your IP address - it resolves to your DNS providers. Also, all links contained on the site will not change the "Address" bar - it will always read your domain name only.

Anyone need any other help ;-)?

They certainly do filter. I called Tech support today and the engineer at Cablevision confirmed they filter 80, 8080, and others. So a web server is out of the question. I am looking into DNS port forwarding in hopes of getting around this. Then I could route http requests (on some other port) to my Linksys, then forward back to 80.

They do block. I have changed my ports and use a dns service to get around this.

Lets say you changed the port of your web server to 11111.

Set your linksys router to port forward 11111 to that machine. In the newer versions, you can use the UPnP to redirect 80 to 11111, but since 80 is blocked, this does nothing.

All you have to do now is create a webforward on your dns provider. Be sure that it is cloaked so the name stays the same.

Cablevision is not blocking HTTP requests from home servers on ports except for 80. That I know for a fact. I've heard from other people that they've even gotten calls from running servers on non-default ports.

OK, got HTTP (Apache) working on port 5906 and mail (qmail) running normally on 25. I'm routing external requests for 5906 to internal port 80 (via my FreeBSD firewall/router), and it's been working fine for over 2 weeks now. I've also added SquirrelMail, which makes checking e-mail on the road a snap. I've had FTP running normally on port 21 for over 2 years now, and I'm hoping the additional bandwidth isn't going to draw any attention to OptOnline anytime soon...

On a similar note, does anyone know if optonline blocks hte bittorrent ports (i.e. 6881-6889, 6969)? I was going crazy trying to get BT working with my router. I tried all different combos of port forwarding, special apps, finally put my pc IP in the DMZ, not luck. Then I bypassed my router all together and it still appeared to me that I was not getting any BT traffic that I didn't initiate (e.g. no peers were connecting to me, but I was connecting to peers).

THis is driving me nuts.

Thanks.

Sorry, don't know anything about Bittorent ... but TheOgre, doesn't OptOnline block port 21 as well?

Nope. My FTP server has been online for over 2 years without a problem, running on port 21.

I don't know too much about BT, as I haven't had the chance to play with it yet. As far as I know, OptOnline only blocks port 80.