Codespaces blocked by firewall: suggestion for work-around

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I am a computer science teacher using Codespaces for my students to make assignments. My students use Codespaces from a browser, installing software locally on their devices is difficult for various reasons. I experience Codespaces being blocked by the firewall of some schools. As discussions with firewall people can be lengthy, I suggest to provide a work-around in Codespaces.

At some schools Codespaces is blocked by the firewall. It seems to be that tunnels.api.visualstudio.com is not trusted by the firewall. I've experienced this with a fortigate firewall, but it may be the same with other firewalls. Appearently the internet service provider of the school configures the firewall to block certain categories of sites. I think the blocking is based on domain name and/or certificates. My technical knowledge does not go deep enough to explain it in more detail.

I noticed that products from other vendors (like gitpod.io, codesandbox.io etc.) use the same technology (VS Code and devcontainers) but they are not blocked by the firewall. My theory is that Codespaces ended up with a less faverable qualification by firewall manufacturers because it uses a domain with the word "tunnels" in it, which may sound alarming to some secutiry people.

My suggestions is to create a second domain without the word "tunnel", for example tracks.api.visualstudio.com. The VS Code client should fall back to this domain in case there is no response on tunnels.api.visualstudio.com

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