Today, I finally managed to bypass an insanely strict firewall that gave me struggles for the past three weeks.

The firewall caused my remote workspace program to connect to the software company’s relay server instead of establishing a direct connection between the two machines. In hopes of reducing latency, I spent the whole day trying to set up a TURN relay server on my machine using coturn, which failed for reasons I’m yet to figure out. When I was just about to give up, I accidentally attempted to create a direct connection on port 443 before booting up the TURN server, and boom! The connection was successfully established; as simple as that.

It turned out that the firewall had port 443 open for UDP all along… 😢 All I had to do was simply modify the connection port to 443 and mask the packets as HTTPS for the direct connection.

Although a lot of hours could’ve been saved if I had given port 443 a try earlier, my efforts were not in vain as I learned a lot about networking in general during the process. Not to mention that the latency is no more!