Ptunnel is an application that allows you to reliably tunnel TCP connections to a remote host using ICMP echo request and reply packets, commonly known as ping requests and replies. At first glance, this might seem like a rather useless thing to do, but it can actually come in your help in some cases.
Setting: You're on the go, and stumble across an open wireless network. The network gives you an IP address, but won't let you send TCP or UDP packets out to the rest of the internet, for instance to check your mail. What to do? By chance, you discover that the network will allow you to ping any computer on the rest of the internet. With ptunnel, you can utilize this feature to check your mail, or do other things that require TCP.
Features:
- Tunnel TCP using ICMP echo request and reply packets
- Connections are reliable (lost packets are resent as necessary)
- Handles multiple connections
- Acceptable bandwidth (150 kb/s downstream and about 50 kb/s upstream are the currently measured maximas for one tunnel, but with tweaking this can be improved further)
- Authentication, to prevent just anyone from using your proxy
What is new in this release:
- Fixes an authentication bug that would manifest as hung connections with protocols that send data from the client-side before receiving data from the server-side. Thanks to StalkR for locating the bug and fixing it.
- Fixes a crash when attempting to enable packet-capture for non-existing network devices. Thanks to Steffen Wendzel for the patch.
What is new in version 0.7:
- This release adds support for syslog and compilation on Windows.
- It also enables tunneling over UDP port 53, and fixes a few minor bugs (in particular, ptunnel should no longer crash due to failed DNS lookups).
Requirements:
- A computer to act as the client (this will usually be your laptop, on the go..)
- Root access, preferably on both computers
- A posix-compliant OS, with libpcap (for packet capturing)
- One computer accessible on the internet that is not firewalled (or at least allows incoming ICMP packets)
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