Ryabitsev:Travel (Linux) laptop setup

My boss was living in China for a few years, and he was complaining daily on the bad internet access and his VPN always broken. He did worked around filtering with custom patch on the VPN, but the traffic was a lot of time quite crappy, making it close to useless for some days.

I also remember a friend visiting China, and being unable to connect by ssh to the build cluster of the project we were working on. We did worked around by using another server as a jump host, but one had to wonder why the first was in some kind of blacklist, as it was back in the days before addresse recycling on cloud infra.

My teammates at Linuxcon Beijing also did express some frustration regarding Internet access, but were able to use Telegram without trouble, so I guess "it depend".

It might not be the GFW, it might just be "good enough" internet deployment, intercontinetal link being overloaded, or something else, but so far, I heard enough people complaining about crappy internet to think this is true.

And yeah, the Chinese Ministry of Communication do try to probe for Tor using active measures (like detecting bridges, etc) in the last years, so I wouldn't be surprised they do have now all kind of automation that might be buggy (or where they just do not care, see various articles on "close enough" mindset in China).