Because system administrators and users have different constraints and proficiencies, it so happens that a user may find himself behind a firewall, that he may cross, but only in awkward ways. This mini-HOWTO explains a generic and portable way to use standard internet tools seamlessly across such firewalls, by the use of an IP emulator over a telnet session.
It is freely inspired by the Term-Firewall mini-HOWTO by Barak Pearlmutter mailto:bap@cs.unm.edu, which relies on an ancient and no-more-supported program named Term (yet a great program at its time), as well as on peculiarities of a not-so-standard telnet implementation, that is, many obsolete and non-portable facts.
Of course, if your sysadm has setup a firewall, s/he might have a good reason, and you may have signed an agreement to not circumvent it. On the other hand, the fact that you can telnet outside (which is a requisite for the presented hacks to work) means that you are allowed to access external systems, and the fact that you can log into a particular external system somehow means you're allowed to do it, too.
So this is all a matter of conveniently using legal holes in a firewall, and allow generic programs to work from there with generic protocols, as opposed to requiring special or modified (and recompiled) programs going through lots of special-purpose proxies that be misconfigured by an uncaring or incompetent sysadm, or to installing lots of special-purpose converters to access each of your usual services (like e-mail) through ways supported by the firewall (like the web).
Moreover, the use of a user-level IP emulator such as SLiRP should still prevent external attackers from piercing the firewall back in the other way, unless explicitly permitted by you (or they are clever and wicked, and root or otherwise able to spy you on the remote host).
All in all, the presented hack should be relatively safe. However, it all depends on the particular circumstances in which you set things up, and I can give no guarantee about this hack. Lots of things are intrinsically unsafe about any internet connection, be it with this hack or not, so don't you assume anything is safe unless you have good reasons, and/or use some kind of encryption all the way.
To sum it up, don't use this hack unless you know what you're doing. Re-read the disclaimer above.
It is assumed that you know what you're doing; that you know about setting up a network connection; that you have shell accounts on both sides of the firewall; that you can somehow telnet (or ssh, or equivalent) from one account to the other; that you can run an IP emulator on both shell accounts; that you have programs able to use the IP connection emulated on their side. Note that any program can use the connection, in case the local emulator is pppd talking to the Linux kernel; other emulators, like Term, need recompilation and linking to a special library.
Talking about IP emulators, pppd can be found in any good Linux distribution or ftp site; so can SLiRP. If your remote shell account is user-level only, you can use SLiRP to connect.
Most described software should be available from your standard distribution, possibly among contrib's; at least all but the two small last ones are available in as rpm packages. In case you want to fetch the latest sources or binaries (after all, one of the ends of the connection may not be running linux), use the addresses below:
SLiRP can be found at
http://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/slirp and/or
ftp://www.ibc.wustl.edu/pub/slirp_bin/.zsh can be found at
http://www.peak.org/zsh/.ppp can be found at
ftp://cs.anu.edu.au/pub/software/ppp/.fwprc and cotty can be found at
http://www.tunes.org/~fare/files/fwprc/.