Firewall

One of my friends is trying to run PennMUSH from a college computer. Unfortunately, his college has a firewall running, and any outside attempts to connect time out. He can connect fine using his internal IP address, but if he tries to use the external one (i.e., the one that's given out to users) he times out as well.

Assuming that this is a problem with the firewall (and correct me if I'm wrong about that) is there a way to get around the firewall? Should he use a certain port, or something like that? Thanks for your help.

Firewalls are designed to stop exactly what you are proposing, so probably not, unless you can convince the firewall admin. A second problem is likely to be that you may be behind NAT (network address translation) and that your internal addresses are private addresses and not visible to the Internet anyway.

If that is the case you would need the firewall admin to "port forward" to your PC, which can technically be done, but they may well not do it if your MUD is not officially sanctioned.

I an only suggest renting time on one of the places that run MUD servers for you. Their rates can be quite low.