updated 12jun01
updated 22nov00
rewritten 23oct00
If you have been blocked from using Napster by your ISP or your
school, there are a number of ways to get back to sharing files
again. However, there are a number of reasons why you might want
not want to do this. Napster (and other such file-sharing applications)
consume an enormous amount of bandwidth. By using such filesharing
programs you may be preventing other students or users
from doing important work on the network. Most networks that permit
Napster traffic find that it consumes the majority of their traffic.
By getting back onto a high-bandwidth sharing network after it's been
banned, you're going to piss off your network administrators. It will
be difficult to prevent it from being evident that you are using
large amounts of bandwidth, regardless of your technique. And if you
get caught, you could get in big trouble.
That said, the fastest way to get back online is to use Napigator if you're on a Windows box and Macigator if you're on a Mac. These will bypass the need to connect to the Napster meta-server (server.napster.com) and will allow you to connect to Napster servers not owned and operated by Napster, Inc. (Such servers are almost all running the excellent OpenNap open source server software.) This should get most people back in a hurry. (Thanks to Chris Lane for the Macigator info.)
You can also simply use another program to share files, like
Gnutella. (Although Gnutella
is not recommended if you're on a modem/dialup line!)
I've devised another way to do it below that is pretty technically
involved. You need to be a Linux administrator (or have a friend
who is!) and has a box that is sitting on a high-speed network
connection whose Napster access is not blocked. That is to say,
if your Napster access is blocked, using a proxy on the same network
isn't going to help you! The proxy just routes traffic on your
behalf - if you can't get through on your network, it won't be
able to either. So if you are such a tech buff and have such a box,
the rest of this document is for you. The proxy should not sit on a
dialup connection.
I only cover directions for configuring a Unix SOCKS proxy, but here's a list of SOCKS5 servers for Windows:
Here is a SOCKS server for the Mac.
rpm -i socks5-1.0r11-1.i386.rpm and your proxy will
be installed.
If you're not running RedHat, you'll have to compile the source yourself,
which really isn't too bad. You can
get the source
from NEC's Socks page. Once you've
downloaded it, type ./configure --with-threads then
make and
then when that's done, log in as root and type make install.
Congratulations! You've installed the proxy server!
/etc/socks5.conf (which
is probably non-existant at this point). Paste in the following:
auth - - u permit - u,c,p - 64.124.41.16 - 8875 permit - u,c,p - 64.124.41.17 - 8875 permit - u,c,p - 64.124.41.19 - 8875 permit - u,c,p - 64.124.41.* - 7777 permit - u,c,p - 64.124.41.* - 8888 permit - - - - - 6699This configuration will allow connections to the Napster metaserver and to each of the known Napster servers (courtesy Markus) as well as allowing direct connections to another Napster client on port 6699.
1234,
stick in this number, whatever you've chosen it to be.
Now to see if all this works...
To start your server in debug mode, type socks5 -s -d -b 1234.
This will start the socks server on whatever port you've chosen.
You'll see a lot of text start scrolling up the screen. Try
starting up Napster on another computer and type in your server's IP address
and port number as the proxy. If you can connect to the Napster network,
and you see a bunch of messages scrolling on your server when you do things
with Napster, then you're ready to roll.
Type killall socks5 to stop the server.
(Careful! don't do this on Solaris as it will kill all
active processes! Just pickout the PIDs to kill and kill them.
[thanks to Alex Tasker])
Try starting the
server with socks5 -d -s -t -b 1234 , this should start the
server on the given port in "threaded" mode. Your system or version of
SOCKS5 may not support this. If it doesn't, the first message you should
see should say Warning: Attempt to run server in threaded mode
when threads were not a compile time option.
If you did see this message, kill the server again with
killall socks5 and start it with
socks5 -p -b 1234 ; this will start socks5 as a preforking
server, similar to what Apache does.
The command returns immediately (you'll be back in your shell), but
it will have started the server. Errors will go to your system error log,
usually in /var/log/messages.
If you did not see this error message, then your server
is threaded! Hooray! It will run very efficiently. Kill the old
server with killall socks5 and start the server for real
with socks5 -t -b 1234 - your server should be up and
running now! Error messages will go to your system error log.
u,c,p)
with 171.23. (except for the very last line, the one
with the string of dashes) -- anyone not coming from that subnet would
be denied access to your proxy.