how do firewalls work?

eek, only know how to set mines, which is to give the firewll permission to act as server..but at least this will get you into the new asnwers.

I R knowing this! this is when I is covering the outside of my friends wall with oil and setting it alight! what a wizard wheez!

I think you would have to go to your administrator and ask them to "punch a hole" in it, aka allow you to connect through the port that these programs use, but I don't think they wiill say yes

I don't know how to install my scanner and CD burner properly. I am not a geek. Good and bad at the same time.

Depends on how your firewall is set. If its a university then your probably screwed. They tend to block lots of port numbers. Every internet program is required to use a port number (WWW is 80, ssh is 22, telnet is 23 and so on) and what several universities did to save some resemblence of speed is block all random port numbers from going out of the network onto the web. Universities usually have only a limited number of connections from its network to THE WEB (1 or 2 for medium or small universities). These connections are usually in the Mb/s range and as they pass through the final router it checks the datagrams port number and if its not on the list of allowable ports it gets dropped by the machine to save bandwidth for more academic uses such as unreal tourniment (port 777 I was told). Plenty of other way to do this though check with your helpdesk.

If you are in residence see if you and your friends can get a high speed connection like ISDN, ABM or whatnot, then plug one persons computer to that connection and run it as a router for those around you (ie on your floor or building) and you a) avoid the university firewall b) have a two gateways to the wonderful world wide web. It might require running two profiles on your netbrowser and some performance loss on your friends computer so make sure they have a good P3 or P4 and a second network card, modem wont do for the most part cause its too slow even for one person. Im not sure how relevant any of that is in Engerland though.

useful, but i really need to know something to put in hostname and port for Morpheus. audiogalaxy's okay, reporrts of its desth have been greatly exaggerated.

Is Audiogalaxy OK again now then? I tried it the other day but it wasn't letting me have anything. I only blimmin wanted some stuff by 2wo Third3!