Are all VPNs now disabled in China

[roddy]

Not in China at the moment, but reliable Internet access is for me, like yersi, an essential. Might be time to look into the dark arts of SSL tunnelling or whatever it was Imron told us about once.*

Some dark-side network geeks must be on course for promotions.

*don't get this confused with yoghurt-making.

[imron]

If you have ssh access to any machines overseas (i.e., you host a website that gives you shell access over ssh), you should be to use that in conjunction with putty to service all your proxying needs, google should be able to tell you more.

[Chinadoog]

Is it just me, or does Freegate purposely block certain sites and links? I seem to remember it blocking porn sites, and it won't let me download certain torrents that I can download when I use a different vpn. annoying.

[David in Shanghai]

ExpressVPN has already emailed a solution to its customers...it's back up and running. They said their VPN was being blocked by China govt, along with other VPNs

[Brian US]

Brian, can you get it to work with Internet Explorer?

Nope.

Is it just me, or does Freegate purposely block certain sites and links? I seem to remember it blocking porn sites

That is why you should stock up for those "dry spells."

[crisgee]

Hotspot Shield still works for me. I'm on v 1.56.

[sthubbar]

After only 36 hours on the new server configuration, I was abruptly dropped, again.

Now switched over to a different server. I'm hoping it lasts longer than 36 hours.

Big Brother is getting serious now. If they keep this up, than it is going to totally change the VPN marketplace.

[imron]

上有政策，下有对策。

[AcuDoc]

This SSH and PUTTY link to a PDF document shows one step by step way of using SSH and PUTTY. The key to the whole thing is Imron's statement "If you have ssh access to any machines overseas." Many people don't but if you have a website hosted outside the PRC, they may give you shell/ssh access and that would be a good starting place. If not, google "free unix shell account" and you'll find a few places that give them, and allow ssh access.

[yersi]

Does anyone have a solution that works on OSX and doesn't involve any network voodoo?

[imron]

If you have OSX you can just use ssh directly as it comes with the system.

From a terminal window, you would type something like:

ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server

(don't forget you'll need to keep the terminal window open for as long as you use the proxy).

A quick google search turned up this article, which explains things in more detail.

[sthubbar]

FYI,

After repeated troubles, I finally was advised by StrongVPN.com to switch over to their L2TP VPN solution. So far, this is providing much better performance than the OpenVPN solution.

This is opposite of what I thought and have read in many technical discussion. L2TP and PPP are supposed to be inferior to OpenVPN because they use fixed network ports that would be easy to block. My experience was that some how it appeared that the GFW was detecting my visiting of undesirable websites despite going over OpenVPN.

Anyway, if anyone is still having problems, I suggest they try our L2TP or even SSTP solutions instead of OpenVPN.

All of these options are available in the standard StrongVPN packages.

[imron]

Just listening to a BBC podcast now and at the end they list a proxy provider https://xunbao888.org for people experiencing difficulties downloading the podcast from within China. Don't know if it works, or if it's any good, just thought I'd share.