Awesome Find #5: NSTX (IP-over-DNS)

Posted: Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 5:00 am
Categories: <a href="http://www.dailycupoftech.com/category/awesome-finds-day/" title="View all posts in Awesome Finds Day" rel="category tag">Awesome Finds Day
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I have yet to try this myself but I have to admit that I am intrigued by the idea. According to this howto, you should be able to configure your system to tunnel IP data through the DNS port from your computer at home, allowing you to surf the Internet even if all other ports are blocked (at least, that is how I understand it to work).

From the website:

You’re sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow DNS traffic, though.

If the ISP allows DNS traffic to any DNS server (and not just their own), you might consider running OpenVPN on UDP port 53 (thanks to Norman Rasmussen for this suggestion). If they don’t, however, NSTX comes to the rescue. NSTX is a hack to tunnel IP traffic over DNS. NSTX (IP-over-DNS) seems cool, but you cannot get it to work. You’ve downloaded the latest version, maybe because you saw it mentioned on Slashdot. You’ve looked at the nstx project page and the freshmeat page. You even tried reading some confusing documentation. Maybe you gave up and tried OzymanDNS. But curiousity got the better of you. You really want to use this.

Once you’ve followed these instructions, you basically have a remote proxy, providing you with access to the Internet. Communication between you and the remote proxy is over NSTX.

Adding this to my “Gotta Try This” list!