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Aargh. I'm leaving for a vacation in China in a week and a half. I guess I'm going to have to set up my own VPN tunnel to ensure that I can still access my email, etc.

I'm assuming I can set something up through my dd-wrt router at home. Off to read the docs...



When I was in China for a year, I just used a company dev server with a ssh socks proxy. It worked well, and it is one command in the terminal, and changing 1 setting in network preferences.

This is much easier than trying to find VPN service that isn't blocked.


if you have shell access to a hosting account...

autossh -M 25841 -ND 127.0.0.1:8088 -i /home/.ssh/id_rsa user@host.com

and then tell your browser (or foxyproxy) to use it. one-line vpn that probably won't get blocked by china, ever.


Yes, set up a private tunnel, don't rely on Tor, Google blocks a lot of their exit nodes, so it's just unusable most of the time.


I used to use a socks proxy via ssh to a box in the US when I traveled to China. I have my own server for this but you can also use a micro EC2 instance as well I believe.

After my last trip, though, I got tired of the speed over an ssh based proxy and installed open vpn on my server and just used a tunnel. Wayyy faster. It's fast enough to watch Hulu and Netflix if your hotel has enough bandwidth.

The other option is to just purchase an openvpn based proxy subscription for a month and use that. Same thing and less fuss. I think running it myself is less likely to result in a blocked IP address since I won't garner as much attention but who knows how much they actually watch and actively block IPs for those services.


I have OpenVPN set up on a linode server in the US. That was working fine until a week ago. Switched hosting to Tokyo instead and that worked fine for a few days. Now my colleagues and I have given up and are using a friend's account with Astrill.


I've been using StrongVPN.com for over a year without any problems. It's speed is decent too. I am not affiliated with them in any way.




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