I’m in a different hotel today, one that is served by Cox Internet, and I immediately discovered that the SSH redirection which worked flawlessly yesterday completely fails here. I can start the secure shell, and it works for a couple minutes or a certain number of bytes, then I get a “connection reset by peer” error and it dies.

I suspect this is due to the War On Peer-To-Peer Protocols that Comcast is in such hot water over. Either Cox or the hotel chain is probably doing the same thing, to every port except port 80 and a handful of others. I can’t confirm this though, because I can’t remotely administer the hardware firewall in the office to punch a hole through it for a different port. I could do it easily if I were in the office, and I could do it easily from here if the SSH tunneling were working, but neither is the case.

I have a plan, though. I can use the SSH connection to copy over a new configuration file (it stays running long enough for that), and I think I can talk someone in the office through making the change to the router tomorrow morning. If so, I’ll try setting the office SSH server to use the HTTPS port (443) instead of it’s normal one (22). Presumably Cox won’t be able to mess with that port, since they won’t know what’s actually secure HTTP traffic and what isn’t. We’ll see how it goes.