how to get around p2p blocking on university campus network?
 

my campus just instituted some kind of program that blocks the use of p2p programs...basically making them either useless, or gives you speeds of under 1k/s

Is there some kind of trick or program that will allow me to get around this? Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thanks

You could try to tunnel the gnutella traffic through a http proxy (most universities offer access to a http proxy). gtk-gnutella can do that and there is a patch for LimeWire floating around to do that.

Tunneling over a HTTP proxy using CONNECT to port 443 usually works fine to any server worldwide, but only few Gnutella servents use port 443 as their Gnutella port. You could at least try if you can connect to some Gnutella servents via the proxy, because some other ports are surely open, too.

You don't have to use port 443 to tunnel. You simply open a connection to the proxy and use:
"CONNECT <remote host>:<any port> HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n"

The proxy should answer (if he can connect) with
"some headers....\r\n
200 OK\r\n\r\n"

And then you are connected to the remote host through the proxy. It works for gnutella messages, uploads and downloads. Unfortunately not all http proxies support that.

An administrator would surely block all CONNECT ports on the proxy server (e.g. squid) that are non-relevant for the university (and blocking would surely include all known file sharing ports). However, certain ports will possibly be open for CONNECT use in addition to HTTPS, like IRC, ICQ, SSH, ... So you might be able to find a servent that is running on one of those ports. But in other cases, you simple won't have the chance to connect. The easiest way to find out what the proxy's policies are is to have a look at its configuration file. ;)