I often find I'm stuck behind a domestic internet gateway for which I do not have the password. My games and bittorrent client are able to open the ports they need for incoming connections via UPnP, but I can't open custom ports manually - e.g. for ssh connections and other services. Does anyone know of a good tool for Windows or Linux that can do this? I even went as far as downloading the Linux UPnP SDK today but didn't get very far with it!
Not quite what I'm looking for - I need a nice way of opening ports on a local firewall, not bypassing it. That said, ssh as a SOCKS proxy has been very useful for other things in the past!
You could try the following method: http://www.howtoforge.com/administrating-your-gateway-device-via-upnp its basically a perl script that uses Net::UPnP to control your internet router. I've not tried so YMMV. you will probably need to install libnet-upnp-perl on debian, ubuntu machines
Nice find! I couldn't actually get it to work with this dodgy router (UPNP might be turned off) but many thanks all the same!