Tag: china

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Google Networking Software Travel

Data roaming

I bricked my Nexus S yesterday, while trying to root it (with an howto for an old Android version). As usual I was trying to do too much stuff with too little time (as I had to catch my plane later that evening).

I had to root it to get OpenVPN, ssh tunnel, or system wide proxies up and running. Things I needed to by-pass the Great Firewall in China on my mobile.

However, when landing in Beijing, and connecting to Twitter, Facebook, and all that other shizzle on my “backup” Nexus S; I noticed all sites were working just fine. Just a tad slow…

I was amazed. As if someone turned off the Great Firewall… 😉

But apparently, when checking what public IP my phone had, it was a Belgian IP address. So basically it seems when roaming, all traffic is rerouted from, say, China Mobile to Proximus (through a VPN?), and routed to the internet, in my case, from Belgium. Which is pretty cool here in China. Means I can access everything as if I were in Belgium.

Anyway, something I didn’t know. Learned something new today. 😉

Categories
Linux Networking Software www

Great Firewall checker

An attempt to create a list of major blocked sites in China (or any other country/ISP). It’s written entirely in Bash.

Github repo riiiiiiight here. It’s used by my PAC-generator.

The Github page is updated once a day by three hosts. One in Belgium, one in The Netherlands, and a Guruplug in China. This way you can compare the results (in case some are down or replying slowly).

As it’s impossible to test every possible site, I just check popular sites (and a bunch of sites from Alexa). But if you know blocked sites not in the list, please submit them — thanks!

At the moment I recheck every site once a day. However I might change this to once/week or something if the list of sites/URLs gets too big.

More shells are welcome, especially in countries such as Libya, Egypt, Tunis, etc 😉

But also additional shells in China are welcome, to prevent the government from blocking my current machine. All I need is a bit of CPU power once/day, 100Mb quota (at most), and Git installed.

Test results are written to three files; a file with sites that work, a file with sites that didn’t get a HTTP 200 reply, and a file with both. You can directly use the file in your application from Github (for example the list of blocked sites in China).

The files are written as CSV-file; “url,check-date,check-time,{ok|nok}”. Ok means the url/site got downloaded, nok means something went wrong (connection reset, time out, etc).

It does NOT check the content of the website (in case a ISP redirects to a different website instead).

This is work in progress though. So it’s likely to change and, hopefully, improve in the future.

Feedback is also greatly appreciated.

Categories
Linux Networking Software www

Proxy.pac generator

I made a simple bash script that generates a proxy auto configuration file.

The PAC file generated redirects all matching rules through the proxy.

The only issue at the moment, is that, once the list gets big, it’s not very performance-friendly. Something I’ll try to fix in the coming days.

I’m using this script to generate a proxy.pac file at work to redirect blocked content in China through the proxy for our employees currently in China.

You can find the Github repo here. Keep in mind it’s work in progress.

 

Categories
Travel

Beijing Flickr set

Set link. Updated (almost) daily. Until the 19th November.

Categories
Travel

Me be leavin’ for Beijing!

Today, I’m leaving for Beijing, China for a whole month as part of my internship at KdG. Wish me luck. 😉

Tons of pics will be posted on Flickr.

I’m not entirely sure what sites and services will be blocked (yay for the Great Chinese Firewall), but my VPN tunnel should do the trick. Hopefully. And I’m still reachable through e-mail.

Bubye x!

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