Tunneling out of a university network to improve ping?

[perfectturmoil]

Ok guys.. I haven't done extensive work with really messy networks... but our school has one..and I need your help.

Here's the deal. Weekends I can play world of warcraft with 140 ping. During the week the ping spikes and stays at 7000-15000 and is rarely anywhere inbetween. I actually use dial-up in order to connect at 500ms... Sad huh? Our throughput is actually pretty decent.. 1,600kbits down 1,800kbits up but the ping is just rediculous. Counterstrike has been fixed by the network administrator either through port passthrough or something..but wow hasn't been.

My question is, will IP tunneling if it can be done improve my ping at all if I can somehow manage to get direct access? The problem is they limit all P2P at our school, and their active limiting has caused huge networking issues.

So any ideas? I'm really out of them myself.
Thanks.

[su root]

IP Tunneling will not improve your ping.

Chances are that they limit all non-websurfing traffic. I would try talking to them about it, see if they can make an exception. (I know, I know, but I've seen it work).

Besides that, it really depends on what they use to shape their network traffic... if it's dumb, you can probably get around it by using a destination port of 80 (I doubt you will be able to configure the game this way, but a proxy using port 80 may work), but if it's smart, it will recognize that it's not http traffic and shape it the same.

Are you allowed to get other internet connections installed? Cable? DSL? Wireless?

[perfectturmoil]

We are, but we're required to pay $70 for this connection.. So I feel like I'm being ripped off if I don't use it. I've tried the proxy on port 80, but it gets picked up on. FTP/http/IRC bandwidth is not limited it seems. There were other random programs that worked as well at times.

Oh well, I guess I'll try talking to the network admin.

[su root]

Hmm... that sucks.

A friend of mine went to a college around here, and when he first arrived, the school had all of the residences limited to web surfing only... no other traffic (including IMs). After enough uprising from the student population, they got quite a bit of stuff openned up for them. Games are a hard one, especially if they are providing the Internet connection for "educational purposes only".

Talk to your network admin, or see if you can rally up support, and if that fails, check with your student union about conflict resolution.. most have some kind of free assistance to resolve conflicts with the school. If you state your case right, that you are required to pay for this internet connection, but your gaming is being seriously limited for no practical reason, then you may have a case.. especially if you can bring a bunch of WoW players in with you.

[ps2cho]

1,600kbits down 1,800kbits

Thats not much at all for a college :/
thats why...
Why do they even have a higher upload than download?

[su root]

Why do they even have a higher upload than download?
They're probably heavily shaping the upload, so there is a lot available for web surfing :/

[perfectturmoil]

And you don't think that attempting to trick it into thinking that wow was a htt protocol would help at all? Or if there is even a way to do it.

[su root]

If it is a "layer 7 packet shaper", then to get by it, you would actually need to use the HTTP protocol, which means you can't really fake it out.

There are ways to tunnel over HTTP, it's wasteful and slow, but it may be quicker than what you have (but not by a whole lot). If I had to guess, I'd say it would be about the same speed as dialup when you are finished.

I know of one tunnel, but tunneling is not for the faint of heart.. it'll be a real pain to get going, if it is possible at all (depends on how easily you can convince WoW to connect to a different server).
The HTTPS tunnel that I know of is called SSL Explorer (http://3sp.com/showSslExplorer.do). It's a java webserver that you can set up on a non-university host. Once that's done, the process is to log in with your web browser, and create and enable a mapping for WoW (I don't know the ports), then have WoW connect to localhost on that port, which will be tunneled through to the remote server using the HTTPS protocol (edit your hosts file to Man In The Middle the requests to blizzard's servers to localhost?).