As my last shell has been disconnected in China (not because I was probing websites, but because the building the Guruplug was in got closed) I’m looking for shells. Linux or Unix. With Git installed. I’ll barely use any disk space and it will probe the websites at most once/day (at night, when you won’t notice it).
And not just China, but any country where they tend to censor certain websites.
Greatly appreciated. 🙂
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.