Help Use Steam Behind Proxy?

[Jon]

Hello,

I realize that your service is more for redirection to specific server, and not a redirection of traffic altogether, but I figured you should be able to answer my question :) 

When I go to school, I take my desktop that I use for gaming. At school, they block all ports except for 80 and 433. Is there any way with the steam-limiter to force Steam to use only those two ports? They do block some websites, but as I can get to the Steam website I would assume that they would not have the Steam servers blocked.

Thanks!

Jon

[Nigel Bree]

On Friday, 17 August 2012 08:10:38 UTC+12, Jon wrote:

I realize that your service is more for redirection to specific server, and not a redirection of traffic altogether, but I figured you should be able to answer my question :) 

Sure thing. First off, the Steam client downloads through port 27030 don't use anything at all like the HTTP protocol - it's a custom thing designed very differently, and so by itself if you tried to fiddle things to go over port 80, if there was a proxy server in the way (which there may be, so that only real HTTP/ssl traffic will pass through) it wouldn't work.

What you would need to make this work is something much more complicated, which is a system for tunneling non-HTTP traffic over HTTP. There are a few of these around, and one is included in Windows nowadays. The big thing about all these is that at the end of the day, all the extra wrapping that is put around your traffic to "tunnel" it needs to be unwrapped at the other end. And that means, you need another end somewhere to do that - and since you then want to get to Valve's servers, that thing on the other end has to function as a NAT-type router so it can talk to Valve on your behalf, get the data, and then send it back to you over the VPN tunnel.

So, it's possible - there are commercial services that offer things like this - but it's quite complicated and most importantly because you need a server on the "other end" of the tunnel, that means a) someone has to pay to run that and pay for the bandwidth costs of that server, and b) the connection will be extra-slow because of all that huge amount of extra work - not to mention that although Valve have Steam servers in just about every place in the world, you would want the tunnel server to be similarly close, and that's challenging as well.

When I go to school, I take my desktop that I use for gaming. At school, they block all ports except for 80 and 433. Is there any way with the steam-limiter to force Steam to use only those two ports? They do block some websites, but as I can get to the Steam website I would assume that they would not have the Steam servers blocked.

The upshot of all that I mentioned above is that the port 27030 downloads - the traditional Steam system - is not something that you can easily tunnel to bypass this block. The new HTTP download system in Steam might, but the decision about which download system to use is made by Valve - there's a whole different process they use for publishing games using the new download system, so that each tiny chunk of the overall game download ends up with an identifiable HTTP URL for getting it.

This is why we have the problem of some ISPs not unmetering all games - for instance my ISP could easily support HTTP game downloads as unmetered, but they don't (for no good reason, but in my country no-one else does it either so they have no reason to bother). Games that use the port 27030 system work unmetered, but games that use the HTTP system I'd be charged for, so steam-limiter blocks them instead by default.

When you're at school, the opposite applies; you'd need all the tunneling-VPN stuff I talked about at the start to make port 27030 downloads work, but the HTTP download system might work fine unmodified. Here's a list of some games that are using that system - just turn off steam-limiter's filtering to try download one of the games from that list, and it might well work, because Steam is download those over port 80 anyway.

Of course, if you're using someone else's bandwidth like that, please be responsible; in particular, most organizations like schools have an Acceptable Use Policy for their internet connection which you should check to see exactly what it says - what you don't want to do is violate their rules if they do have one on any kind of downloads, because schools in particular tend to come down quite hard on policy violations as a matter of principle.

- Nigel