Is there any way to force a program to use port 80?

n8tehgr8

Honorable
Oct 12, 2012
16
0
10,510
Hi,

I am at college now, and they have blocked the ports for certain games. There is nothing in the internet use policy that says that we are not allowed to game online, and some games work (basically all Valve games). The game in question is Smite, one of my favorite games when I am at home. I was wondering if there was someway to make Smite use port 80 instead of whatever port it currently uses, because it is blocked at the school. An email to the IT guy basically told me that he did not have the power to open/close ports. Any and all suggestions would be great. Searching the net up until this point did not give me too much info. I am pretty bad when it comes to networking, so try to make the explanations simple.

Thank you very much,
Nate
 
Any service, whether a game, webserver, or whatever, that’s accessed through a public router you don’t control and depends on port forwarding for inbound requests, is always problematic. No administrator is going to allow ports to be opened arbitrarily, and esp. not for the sole benefit of one user. It’s both a security issue and administrative headache.

OTOH, if the game needs to use an *outbound* port other than port 80, that’s another issue. In that case, some applications allows you to change the outbound port. Or perhaps you can tunnel it through port 80 using a VPN or other proxy. IOW, the request is sent to port 80 as it passes the local router’s firewall, but gets redirected by the VPN/proxy to the actual destination/port once past it.