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What do you mean? See it is very easy to sit there and pass comments. I just fervently pray that you do not get trapped behind such a draconian firewall.

umm...dumb question but did you try an http tunnel?

Not so dumb as you think. The situation is like this...

Even after allowing all SSL_ports and Safe_ports (this was done using Webmin, so I did not see the /etc/squid.conf, we are unable to use IRC on ports 6667, 8000. Irssi says "temporary failure in name resolution", while GAIM says "proxy connection error 503". However Yahoo! and Jabber are working using GAIM AFTER opening the ports in Squid. Jabber on the usual 5222, while Yahoo! on 8001.

At this point I have a feeling that the IRC ports are blocked in the firewall too, because I had heard our sysadmin (when the network was set-up) remark that all IRC activity will be blocked. He made no remark about Jabber or Yahoo!.

I do use a HTTP tunneller, corkscrew, to do ssh into public servers. Regarding ssh, one needs BOTH corkscrew and the opened ports in Squid to do anything at all. In a scenario where only the Squid acls are relaxed but tunneling not done, ssh also says "Temporary failure in name resolution".

At this point I have a feeling that one needs to tunnel GAIM like ssh. But following the instructions in http://www.http-tunnel.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=1227&, I get "proxy connection error 503" for IRC and "Couldn't connect to host" for Jabber (GTalk). Please note that this was done with the Squid acls relaxed, whereby Jabber and Yahoo were connecting without tunneling, but IRC was not.

Cheers, Debarshi