Ubuntu – Anti Censorship software

networkingPROXYsoftware-recommendationvpn

I live in China and daily I have to face the great firewall pain 🙁

On Windows/Mac/Android there are many VPN and other services but on Linux there are only a few that I know of.

Right now I am using these ones:

Tor (here works only with obfs3 bridges)
Lantern
XX-Net
ShadowSocks (you ll need a server address or configure your own server)

Usually the above programs set up a local proxy so
SwitchyOmega is to me the best way to switch between them.

ShadowSocks

It is easy to configure a server/client, if you don't have a server 'outside the firewall' one option is to
configure a Shadowssocks server on Amazon AWS: for one year amazon give you a server for free (but they will charge some small fees if you exceed the monthly data traffic).
With AWS the only issue is that you'll have to change the IP in your client configuration every time you restart the server:
you can workaround this programmaticaly with aws-cli I have shared a bash script here

Psiphon

There is an experimental version for linux but it does not work for me in China. ( the phone app works so you can use the below method to route your traffic to the pc )

Route your Android VPN to your pc

if your Android VPN is able to route all your phone traffic, You can create SSH tunnel to your phone (see)

Do you know any other software?

Best Answer

Opera browser has free vpn function. Opera don't presents in official ubuntu repository but could easily downloaded from official web site www.opera.com In Security section of settings select VPN. In address bar of browser you can use vpn location selector.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – OpenVPN – Linux client could not access internet, routing issue

I could solve the issue by lowering the "metrics" of my ethernet/wifi card. you can lower the metrics (priority) of the routing entries for your network card via the "route" command or by using the additional tool "ifmetric" (sudo apt-get install ifmetric) i.e. ifmetric eth0 100 (0 = highest priority)

After that I recognized that the DNS entries from the openvpn server has not been taken over when vpn connection has been setup. so I googled around and I found an answer that you need to add on the ubuntu client the following lines on its config file:

script-security 2
up /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf
down /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf

This updates the DNS entries in the /etc/resolv.conf when the vpn connection is established by using the pushed entries from the server.

So it works now like a charm.

UPDATE: I had as well to install the package "resolvconf" (sudo apt-get install resolvconf) otherwise the script "/etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf" will not work and "/etc/resolv.conf" will not be updated with the nameserver

Ubuntu – OpenVPN client cannot access any network except for the server itself after connection

Check your default route:
```
ip route | grep default
```

Output

default via 84.88.154.1 dev enp7s0 proto static metric 100 
default via 192.168.1.1 dev enp3s0 proto static metric 20101

When enp3s0 is your default output interface for internal network, then

Command:
```
sudo nano /etc/ufw/before.rules
```
Edit the before.rules file:

/etc/ufw/before.rules:

#
# rules.before
#
# Rules that should be run before the ufw command line added rules. Custom
# rules should be added to one of these chains:
#   ufw-before-input
#   ufw-before-output
#   ufw-before-forward
#

# START OPENVPN RULES
# NAT table rules
*nat
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0] 
# Allow traffic from OpenVPN client to enp3s0 (change to the interface you discovered!)
-A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/8 -o enp3s0 -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT
# END OPENVPN RULES

# Don't delete these required lines, otherwise there will be errors
*filter
. . .

Command:
```
sudo nano /etc/default/ufw
```
Change: /etc/default/ufw:
```
DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY="ACCEPT"
```
Commands:
```
sudo ufw disable

sudo ufw enable
```