

Working remotely... from China. Advice? - gaoshan

I'm going to be working (web development) from China for the next few months. I've done this before so let me explain how I did it and then ask if anyone has any advice on how you would do it.<p>I frequently need access to SSH, FTP, our version control stuff (Vault... yuck), and then basic chat, email and web access. Working from China means dealing with pretty bad lag at times though that isn't a major issue as I am not dealing with video or gaming or remote desktops or anything heavy like that. I will sometimes run into the Great Firewall but have no trouble doing what the Chinese do (using anonymous proxy servers or setting up Tor) to get around such things. Tor and proxies slow things down pretty bad but they are better than nothing and are only needed occasionally as the sites I am accessing are rarely blocked. In addition to Tor and random anonymous proxies I have also tried using Hamachi. It worked to a certain extent but was eventually blocked (I suspect) by the Great Firewall and frankly, it just gives me visual access to my home desktop... something I would really rather access via SSH anyway as SSH is fast and my Unix-foo is adequate. So, that is what I have done in the past, now...<p>What sorts of advice do you folks have for how to work as effectively as possible from within China? I will not have access to a private company's network so that is out of the question. My access comes from the wireless I have set up in my apartment in China (Hangzhou... sweet city) or from access at Starbucks (yeah, I know... perhaps I will carry a small bottle of Massengill in my bag).
So, have any of you worked from inside China? If so, where? Any practical tips you have are most appreciated as I will have a reasonably heavy workload (mostly PHP, MySQL) this summer and will want to be as efficient as possible. Thanks!
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lsc
huh. at my VPS hosting business, I have a lot of customers from China, several
of whom run VPN tunnels out through me.

Now, I'm in the US, so I imagine you'd get better results with a server in
Europe or Japan or somewhere else nearby, but I guess many of these people
think saving a few bucks is worth the latency.

Now, if you have a good connection, you are probably only talking 400ms
latency, which is bad but not unusable for ssh work.

If the connection is lossy or gets disconnected, you will find the 'screen'
utility to be useful.

All I'm saying is tunneling through a well-connected server or vps that you
control may be better than tunneling through free services.

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gaoshan
screen is one of those things I've been meaning to look at forever now. How
will it help me? As opposed to, say a vanilla SSH session?

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lsc
so normally, when you are connected to your remote host, and you are in vi or
something, if you get disconnected it kills your vi, right? pain in the ass.
If you connect to your remote server, then run screen, then run vi from within
screen, if you get disconnected, vi is still running. re-connect to your
server, type screen -x and you are back exactly where you were.

~~~
gaoshan
Interesting. I'm going to give it a try, thx.

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russell
No China experience, but I rely on VPN to access remote servers. AFAIK that
will allow you to access the web without problems.

