SonicWALL Still Hates Us


In case you’ve ever wondered, “why don’t I ever run into those Hack a Day scamps at the Panera?” It’s because SonicWALL thinks we’re a “Hacking/Proxy Avoidance Systems” and the more inexplicable “Usenet News Groups.” We’ve gotten many reports from readers over the years about getting blocked by various vendors’ proxies. Do you have any trouble viewing Hack a Day from your school/work? What “service” are they using? We use ssh’s application level dynamic port forwarding to get around most systems when we’re on the road.

34 thoughts on “SonicWALL Still Hates Us

  1. I use opendns (free) at work to block all the porn sites and anonymous proxys so there aren’t easy ways around it. The first thing I noticed blocked was hackaday. But since I’m the admin, I just added it to the whitelist. :)

  2. My schools 8e6 Firewall blocked hackaday.com (as well as yahoo.com) for being on the blacklist. Put a www in front of it though, and it worked.

    Hooray for incompetent IT staff! They also had an (apparently) older version of Smoothwall that didn’t block it.

  3. my school blocks this site, and almost all other sites i try and visit (music, linux, hacking, all of which are listed as reasons that they are blocked) using their lightspeed content filtering… i went through a proxy every couple days until i got caught, then i just decided to use my nokia n800, *gets all shifty eyed* i didn’t hack the school’s very poorly secured wireless networks i haven’t the foggiest clue about that.

  4. Smeg, my systems admins at highschool were compitent, inteligent systems admins who wrote parts of our web filter (DansGuardian), and even noticed me surfing round it via translating the web pages into german – was just a pity that they couldn’t understand german and thus wern’t able to add anything to the filter :p

    Russian and Japanese worked well behind the Systemec filter at collage, and so did the most basic of proxys, although that was almost definately due to bad systems administration…

  5. They block this website at the college I go to using the nazi-proxy sophos webguard or whatever. Fortunately the old squid proxy stayed in place, so we all use that to get to most websites while keeping the speed.

  6. Sonicwall is the WORST company I have ever had dealings with. A customer of mine ditched his old IT consultant in favor of hiring me. The old guy wouldn’t pony up the password for the Sonicwall backup device. The password recovery mechanism wasn’t working. Sonicwall sent a replacement device to the wrong address and UPS returned it as undeliverable. It’s been TWO YEARS now and they still won’t try to send another replacement!

    No wonder they won’t listen to you. They don’t listen to anyone!

  7. at my school it’s not blocked, as the IT guy here does this kind of stuff so he doesn’t care when he sees me on it, but for things like youtube or other stuff I have firefox installed on my flash drive and goto the library where for some reason he has not yet realized that external devices are allowed to run unknown programs without the admin pass… so he never set blocks that work for firefox!
    also, when I tried accessing the C: drive via firefox, it wasn’t blocked either… as a prank I edited an .xml file for a program he uses for a class (some rocketrty program) and put parodies of teacher’s names and other schools as the names of the materials you build the rockets from, he had no idea how it was done, but he was assured that there was no vital breach in security (through an anonymous .txt file)

  8. I’m surprised no one has mentioned openvpn. At my last job they used websense and while hackaday wasn’t blocked, many other sites were. I always use openvpn when on a public network, first my server doesn’t block any sites and secondly, it encrypts all my communications so no one can sniff them. Plus I can easily mount my nfs mount for my music. Proxy’s are nice but once openvpn is setup, I just have to click connect and I’m connected. (Using tunnelblick on my mac)

    It can be a little tricky to setup the forwarding bits but fairly easy to setup if you have a linux box at home.

  9. It was blocked at my school, I also used application level forwarding with putty (windoze computers, no permissions to install stuff). Freecap also worked well for tunnelling remote desktop/vnc out.

  10. Damn… best bet imo is to either use a web proxy or SSH tunnel, should be fine since outbound SPI is usually wide open. In the more recent versions (4.0+) There is an HTTPS IP based web filter, still relatively buggy though.

    I’d suggest Hack-a-day have a https version then just browse by IP (preferably a different public IP then the HTTP version that may not be cached in CFS).

    Yeah… I have to work with these shitty things all day…

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