When you get your new online game, you really just want to install it and play. Some, actually look at the instructions and notice you are asked to open a slew of ports. Others just try to connect and find that it fails. Each may lead to the step of searching how you open these ports or why you need to.

The newer type of online games want to provide rich features to the user base. They like to push automatic updates to you, provide news through a game management client, in-game advertisement, monitor your PC while playing and report this information back, etc… Still, all of these should be outbound connections and shouldn’t require you to open a single port inbound (unless you are hosting a game or running a server).

I believe the following are possible problems when a game asks you to open up several inbound ports:

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I was FINALLY able to set up a jailed SFTP server. This basically has circumvented one of OpenSSH’s drawbacks as a secure protocol. Normally, a user accessing the server via SFTP can have full read-only access to the entire server. Needless to say, this can be a security risk (a major one at that). What this patch does is restricts a “sftp” user to its home directory and restricts access to SFTP only (i.e. no interactive SSH sessions).

Thanks to Mads Madsen and Minstrel for helping me set up a chroot-ed SFTP server running on Ubuntu 7.10
Check out the Ubuntu guide HERE

Minstrel’s original guide can be found HERE. This might be useful for anyone else running other flavors on *nix.