SSH to computer with shared public IP and no admin rights over the router

Question

I live in a student dorm (off-campus) and all students of the dorm share the same WAN IP (Internet or public IP), which is fortunately static. I am not an admin and have no control over the router that assigns private IPs to all of the students, so I can't really forward port 22 to my computer.

Is it still possible to establish an SSH connection to my dorm computer from a computer on campus?

Solution 1

If you have access to another Linux box, out on the Internet, then you can connect from your dorm to it, and set up a reverse ssh tunnel. Then, when you leave your dorm, connect to that box and tunnel back through to your dorm machine.

You might need a cheap shell account somewhere, or get a friend to hook you up with an account on their box. Or maybe you have a shell account with your school that you can use for this.

In order to keep the ssh tunnel alive, refer to this question.

Solution 2

If you don't have control over the "router" (really a NAT box), then if it's setup to respect UPnP requests, perhaps you can use that to tell it to open an incoming port for you.

Otherwise you'll have to tunnel in from some other machine with a real IP somewhere.

Solution 3

The real answer is to ask the local network administrators for help, rather than attempting to work around the restrictions that they have placed on the network.

Solution 4

Alternatively you can access SSH shell to your computer without IP Public from desktop or just a smart phone (e.g. Android) by installing robotito in your computer that u want to access SSH remotely.

• This will allow you to access SSH using from Google Talk Client Apps anywhere.
• There is no need for a public IP address or special setting.
• I'ts Free and Open Source, Not Paying any application services anymore.
• No need to open SSH port (keep your computer save)
• No need to open any tunneling (e.g. VPN or somethink like that)

I made a script (tested on my raspbian OS in Raspberry Pi) so u can easily install robotito on Raspberry Pi, Debian or Ubuntu Box(debian package distribution). this is the steps to get your linux box remotable:

1. Open Shell Command or u can call it Terminal, go to your home folder, Download installer script by command :

   $wget https://opengateway.googlecode.com/files/robotito

2. after that running the script by entering command :

   $sudo ./robotito

3. and then you can edit file credentials.rb from config folder if robotito using your gtalk account and save it by pressing ctrl+x and y . Default is using nano editor.

4. running the robotito from robotito folder by command

   $cd robotito

   $./jabbershd start

5. Now that this is done you can use ssh from any google talk client, don't forget to add the robotito gtalk account to your google talk account and test it with chatting each other before using the account.

View more solutions

Comments

[RJFalconer]

He's not circumventing a security restriction, and I think that realistically finding the right person to talk to at a university is going to be just as unlikely as them being willing to change network settings for you. By solving the problem yourself, everybody wins.

[user2198603]

Actually I recently found somewhere in the obscure documentation of my dorm network that each each student is assigned a port from higher ports for the ssh-server. So I run the ssh-daemon on my laptop and make it listen to that port instead of 22. Problem solved!! :)