As described yesterday, I talked someone at the office through the process of punching a hole in our firewall for the secure HTTP port this morning, then changed the SSH server to use that port instead. It didn’t solve the problem; apparently Cox already thought of that, and they’re only allowing legitimate HTTPS packets on port 443. (Joshua suggested that might be the case yesterday, but I scoffed at it… sorry Josh, you were right.)
There’s apparently a way to work around this too, involving putting an actual mini-HTTPS server program on the office machine, which redirects information coming into it to the SSH port. We’re going to be at this hotel for several more days, so I’ve got plenty of time to work on that.
Looks like you’re going to have an interesting Rube-Goldberg contraption to deal with Cox Internet.
As it turns out, it’s not Cox Internet that’s the problem. Or at least, they’re not doing it to other (residential) customers — I visited my sister’s place today, and their high-speed Internet connection (also supplied by Cox) doesn’t have this problem.
I did some research on this, and it looks like it should be fairly easy to use an HTTP proxy and a program called corkscrew to bypass this. Unfortunately, I’m not real confident in my ability to remotely install an HTTP proxy on the office machine running Cygwin, which is presently the only machine available for it. It looks like I’m just going to have to deal with this problem until we head back in a few days.
Darn, and I was going to have lots of fun telling jokes about how Cox [inhales]. 😉