How can I connect to network applications behind a restricted router?

Question

One of my friends receives her internet from her apartment complex and certain network applications (MapTool and World of Warcraft) cause problems with connecting to other servers. She is able to find the server and connect but then almost immediately is disconnected from the server.

I asked the people on the MapTool forum about this problem but they were unable to help and so I thought, since it is happening for WoW as well, that there might be a bigger problem.

Obviously, since she gets her network from the apartment complex she has no access to the router to change or edit any settings on it, but she does have admin access to her own laptop.

She has an HP Laptop running Windows 7. She has very little computer experience although I have been able to walk her through some things in the past and so could do so again.

Also of note is that some network applications do work, Neverwinter Nights as well as a rather simple C# application that I wrote so the router is selectively blocking things.

Lastly, if I set MapTool (which runs a server on my local machine) to use the port that Neverwinter Nights uses it still fails.

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EDIT: Its important to note that its not the ports that are the problem as I mentioned above, she cannot connect to my MapTool server even if I use the same port as Neverwinter Nights (which she can connect to). Also the WoW updater uses the same ports as WoW and that works just fine. So it is something else.

Also, she uses McAfee firewall with the Windows 7 Firewall disabled, but even when she disabled the McAfee there she was still unable to connect, so again its not that.

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Second Edit: This problem is fixed, she brought her computer somewhere and had it looked at (it was a problem with her computer and not the network). I asked what the problem was but she said she kind of zoned out when they went technical so I guess we will never know.

Answer 1

IP tunnels. What you want is to take the blocked traffic and hide it inside of a "tunnel" that looks like allowed traffic to the firewall/router. Assuming SSH is allowed, use Putty to tunnel, say, the WoW traffic, through an SSH tunnel. The setup may be too slow, but seeing for yourself is a fun way to find out.

An instance of using PuTTY...
http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/sshtips.htm

Answer 2

If the connection truly is restricted ie some ports are blocked, you'll have to "tunnel" it over one of the allowed ports. This sort of functionality can be provided by SSH tunnels or by VPNS.

Hamachi is an example of a VPN provider that would do this for you - just make sure that 'the internet' and whatever you're trying to connect to see your Hamachi address not you ISP WAN address. To do this you need to make sure that outbound traffic prefers the Hamachi interface, which you can do by setting the priority of your network connections.

Depending on how MapTool/ WoW work it may be that the net connection isn't actually restricted, but that it implements a crippled form of NAT, that doesn't support what you need to do. Or if you're trying to setup a server to accept inbound connections (ie connection initiated by others, not you), you'd need to setup port forwarding for things to work which obviously isn't possible here. In any case, using tunneling is the most likely means to succeed.