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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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
Bringing non-disposable technology to China is a mistake in most circumstances.
Don’t make any connection to your home server, period.
I would not try to access a server from China. Can’t you let someone else take care of the machine in the meantime? It’s always a good idea to have some backup admin just in case.
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.
Maybe it is possible, maybe not. GFW may interfere with zerotier connections.
If that doesn’t work, you can consider using Alibaba Cloud’s HK server for transit.
Generally speaking, if you come to China for work or pleasure like ishowspeed, there is basically no risk. I wish you a pleasant trip to China.
What you’re asking is illegal where you’re going
Best of luck to you
Is it illegal to backup my photos to the NAS in my house? I’m not even attempting to access banned services
Bypassing the GFW is illegal
Unauthorized VPNs (non government approved) are illegal in China. If a business needs their own they can get approval but they have to apply for those exceptions.
It isn’t really enforced, probably especially so for non citizens, but if you do something they don’t like it is something they could use against you.
You would probably be less breaking the law to just directly open up SSH and access that instead of tunneling through a VPN. Even though SSH can do tunneling of its own.
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
Yes, I do know and realize that. Why it’s probably not a good idea to try connecting to your homelab lol
Just connect, they don’t block random IPs for no reason. You need to transfer a lot of traffic to trigger something
I found deepseek was good for using as a search engine. Lol.
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.
