piercing corporate FW outbound

[Michael ODonnell]

Crap.  I accepted my current job with the
understanding that I had a fairly secure home network
(protected by [A] a firewall and [B] the total
absence of Microsoft products) to which I expected
to have access from work via SSH, and I was told
"no problem".  Two days after I started, though,
the geniuses in the IT gang started blocking port 22
(because SSH isn't "secure", you see...)  while somehow
allowing themselves to believe that a corporate IT
infrastructure based entirely on a Windows monoculture
qualifies as an acceptable risk.   Grrrr.....

Anyway, until recently I've still been able to get
through by having my home server answer on port
80, as well, but now the IT geniuses have started
doing some sort of traffic- or packet-analysis and
squelching my SSH connection attempts on port 80, too.
How do they do that?  and what can I now do to obtain
my promised access, short of soiling my network by
bringing a Windows box in and running the officially
blessed VPN client?

Oh, I forgot to mention that there's a Nortel
Contivity VPN rig involved, and they want me to go
through that, and there's supposedly support for some
Linux modules that allegedly work with it, but I get
the sense that Nortel/Apani's attitude about Linux
could best be characterized as a middle finger lifted
in my general direction...

 (sorry for venting, but I'm not having any fun today)