Server access from China

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From North America, and I’m going on vacation in china for a few weeks. I wonder if anyone knows if I’ll be able to access any of my self-hosted services over zerotier while I’m abroad?

Edit:
To be specific, I’m hoping to ssh into my machine over zerotier in case I need to fix something and back up some photos to my home NAS via rsync or something

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What you’re asking is illegal where you’re going

Best of luck to you

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From what I've read if you use a VPN it's pretty simple to get past the great firewall of china. It's also only technically illegal, and not really punished.

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Look into shadowsocks, or just normal vpn.

Pandafan was quite reliable for me. You might also be able to diy with hk, sg or sk vps instances, but it was a lot of work and a misconfiguration will cut you off.

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Doesnt it also depend on the type of VPN and the providers?

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You realize not only Google is blocked, but also Brave search, duckduckgo, everything but Russian and Chinese search engines? You can't find anything on them except scams and SEO spam

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Well, no, if you open a wireguard connection it well just get dropped in a minute. You need to do a lot more work than that

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Normal VPN doesn't work because they don't mask themselves. Even Tor bridges don't work because they are blocked.

Shadowsocks is like 2018 advice, go directly to xray and forget about legacy software

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They worked for me most of the time. They cut off after like an hour of use. So I just switch between them.

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If you will be using roaming for mobile data in China, you won't face any blocking.

Accessing over cloudflare tunnels or just a normal exposed server works.

VPNs work most of the time. But you can be cut off after like 30 minutes to an hour. I'd recommend only turning it on when you need it.

I've been to China very recently.

You will most likely face speed issues, although this may be due to the physical infrastructure itself connecting China to the outside internet isn't really that stellar. As everything Chinese citizens typically use is hosted in China.

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Not really. It's a grey area. They don't care about foreigners using vpns at all. It's kind of expected. Foreign SIMs don't even face blocks on mobile networks. If you're going to a sensitive province of China, I think they'll care slightly more, but as long as you're not using the VPN to do something illegal, you'll be okay.

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I found deepseek was good for using as a search engine. Lol.

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Is it illegal to backup my photos to the NAS in my house? I’m not even attempting to access banned services

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It depends.
Very much. And this is the main problem: There isn't "one" solution, you will need a few.

The thing with the PRC is: Their great firewall isn't "one big uniform block". It's fairly "variable".

For example: In Beijing,even 10 years ago, I could access google maps and Facebook without any issues(back then highly blocked) as long as my mobile phone was roaming.
The second I was on wifi of course it was blocked. But even the cheapo VPN my colleague had did work out fine.
Until the day the police started to prepare for the party convention - then suddenly my colleague couldn't get out, neither could I with our company wifi and even my carefully crafted wire guard over HTTPs didn't work - unless I was in the wifi of the hotel or our host company. There it did.
Party congress over? Back to normal operations.

If you travel through the country you will find that in one place solution A works, in another solution B. Generally the more rural (or closer to Tibet/Xinjiang/Myanmar) you get, the more restrictive it seems to be.

Personally I would simply get there different commercial VPNs to make sure you have a choice to get out at all - there are various ones with a good PRC reputation. Most providers have trials as well.
And then double tunnel through that if you can't directly reach your usual VPN at home

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Yes, I do know and realize that.
Why it’s probably not a good idea to try connecting to your homelab lol

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Bypassing the GFW is illegal

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tailscale worked some times, but seemed to depend on the location of the moon relative to the air speed of a nearby sparrow and it was really slow.

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Yes, xray is better. Forgot about that. I think there had been a couple newer ones.

The thing with gfw circumvention is that even older approaches work surprisingly often, as detection methods change and often detection depends on the amount of suspicious traffic. I had most success with a more conventional setup on a vps, but that was more for testing out stuff. Found commericial providers to be more reliable.

VPNs work surprisingly often from what others tell me. They only block these occasionally. I think astrill and express often work. Just know that the ones that work, probably have chinese govt access.

Yes, tor never works.

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I wouldn't access anything nor would I take any tech with you.

Don't risk it

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People posting here don't realize that CN gov IDs and allows certain traffic to get rerouted through a certain VLAN so they can do DPI and record every packet through a beefy expensive tap device to analyze the telemetry later, and potentially build a case against you. If they so choose. And they likely have the capability to trivially decrypt TLS.

Don't bring in any tech, don't access your personal net back home, don't expect any level of actual privacy or good intentions. Just do your business and keep your digital digital persona minimal while there.

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Server access from China