LogMeIn.Com and Frustrating Network Management Workaround?
February 21st, 2008 | by network |
I am in an apartment complex at school, so I am behind the complex firewall / router / etc and have no access to adjust anything.
I wish to use remote desktop connection, and found out I could do so with logmein.com. It works great and has no firewall / port forwarding issues to deal with.
HOWEVER, the complex has decided that each day, you must first go through a ‘portal’ and click a button before you have access to the internet. You open the internet in the morning, the first thing you see is ‘click here to go to …portal’. A page opens with a news section that hasn’t ever had anything updated or important in it, then you click a button that says ‘take me to the internet’. After doing so, you can browse without interruptions until the following day.
If I have ‘activated’ the internet by visiting the portal, I can connect via logmein.com. However, when the next day rolls around, I can no longer connect. The PC is available from logmein.com, but it times out connecting.
So, any advice? How does logmein.com work anyways? Is it through port 80?
I noticed that torrent files continue to download even if I have not visited the portal, so that makes me think this portal feature is only active on port 80, which makes me think I could get around it - somehow. Torrent is set up on some other port, although speeds are slow since no ports are open (I’m not even sure how it even works, but it does - slowly).
At first I was hoping it was a cookie thing with the networking and I could simply edit the cookie to make it last indefinitely. However, I couldn’t find any cookies related to the portal. I’m not a networking guy so I am not sure how this kind of portal works.
Any advice?
COY
2 Responses to “LogMeIn.Com and Frustrating Network Management Workaround?”
By Nick B on Feb 24, 2008 | Reply
You could set up a script to automatically open the internet and click the connect button each day.
By johntrottier on Feb 26, 2008 | Reply
What the school is doing is implementing a system that keeps the number of machines accessing the internet to a manageable number by “cleaning up” unused connections each night. . Their router then allows access to the internet on request as it is being told to by the Portal program.
Logmein works by periodically sending an “I’m alive and on the Internet” message to the Logmein server. Because it it not a continuous connection, when the router “cleans up” at the end of the day and turns off all permissions that are not active, Logmein can no longer get out.
You torrent is a continuous connection, so it stays active. It’s slow because you are “leaching” downloading without uploading. You can’t upload because you cannot port forward, so it will be slow.
How to fix it. Try just keeping a torrent downloading in the background. That way your connection will not be closed at the end of the day.
Or you can talk talk to the IT group. If you have a valid reason to access your machine remotely, they can set up a VPN tunnel for you, or allow your machine continuous Internet access, or give you a URL that will allow you to open the portal for your machine.