
Ask HN: Moving overseas to a 250kb/s connection, any life hacks? - nathancahill
I do freelance software engineering, and my wife accepted a job with the US State Department overseas in a country with low bandwidth&#x2F;flaky internet (the power goes off frequently too). Fortunately the bulk of my work is coding which can be done offline. However, I still maintain web servers, use GitHub, Slack and email for communication on projects.<p>Any hacks for low bandwidth&#x2F;flaky internet? I&#x27;m wondering about tools to heavily cache webpages, maybe setting up a proxy or VPN that does server-side compression? Anyone have experience dealing with this?
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ams6110
Depending on the details, 250kb/s might not be _that_ bad.

I used to work remotely on 56kb dial-up, which was in reality never better
than about 46kb/s. Way back in school I had 2400 baud. Now THAT was slow.

Best to have a remote machine on a good network, that you ssh to for anything
that needs high bandwidth. Use tmux or screen (also helpful if you get
disconnected unexpectedly). Then you only need enough bandwidth to draw the
screen updates.

If you do need to use VNC or Remote Desktop dial the colors and resolution
down to as low as you can stand.

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privong
If you're doing lots of remote connections, I have found mosh
([https://mosh.mit.edu/](https://mosh.mit.edu/)) to be a useful replacement
for / supplement to ssh.

From their landing page:

 _Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent
connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user
keystrokes._

 _Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It 's more robust and responsive, especially
over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links._

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asher_
I feel for you, those kinds of speeds would be awful to live with.

Here are some of the things that came to mind for web browsing:
[https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-
compression](https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-compression)
[http://www.opera.com/turbo](http://www.opera.com/turbo)
[https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/silk/](https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/silk/)

Depending on the cost of connections there, you can also combine them with
something like the TP-LINK TL-ER5120. We use one in our office here in Vietnam
to combine 3 connections (supports up to 4) and it works very well.

~~~
nathancahill
Oh, excellent! Very cool, thank you.

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nwrk
Using on mac while on expensive and high latency data

1) Mosh - access to servers

2) DNSmasq - cache of DNS responses

3) Squidman - Squid web cache proxy with UI
[http://squidman.net/squidman/](http://squidman.net/squidman/)

4) SShuttle - Easy poorman's vpn
[[https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle)]

Much better experience.

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TheMog
If you're dealing with Unixy systems, resort to the command line and also use
something like tmux or screen to preserve the session when (not if) you're
getting disconnected.

