Preparations for the Great Firewall GFW

Shanghai - here I come!

So, I'm going to China. To Shanghai to be more precise. For the unprepared this means a total shut-out from the 'real' internet, as we know it.

How come, you might ask? Well, the Chinese government has since (at least) the 1990s made efforts to tackle computer crime and as a part of "The Golden Shield Project" a "Great Firewall" was created.

This firewall blocks pretty much everything that the Chinese government deems a threat to their supremacy. (Analyzer)

... a solution?

In preparation for this I am in the process of setting up my own VPN solution to attempt to cut through the crap. I am fully aware of the many existing, free and paid, VPN solutions out there, but they tend to go up and down in accordance to the political mood of the day.

I plan to have an VPN endpoint in Sweden (from where I originate) and a VPN entry in my apartment in Shanghai.

Great plans

I currently have an old Asus Eee Box EB1012 as the Swedish endpoint, running Ubuntu server. I recently bought a new box for the Shanghai entrypoint, a Zotac Zbox CI323 nano. This small beauty I plan to run xenServer with two VMs, pfSense and an Ubuntu server. Reasons for the Ubuntu server is to enable Shadowsocks as a VPN tunnel between the two endpoints.

... with problems

Unfortunately I've run into the first problems with the CI323 and xenServer. The xenServer doesn't pickup the WiFi hardware. This is where I'm currently at, searching to resolve this.

What I know (or think I know):

• xenServer is a CentOS 7 'distribution'. (
• # cat /etc/centos-release "XenServer release 7.0.0-125380c (xenenterprise)"
• I've found strings in settings files that suggests that this is CentOS 7.
• CI323 have an Intel 5100 AGN WiFi NIC. The accompanying Windows drivers disc have the strings "ProWireless 5100AGN" that gives this clue. (shows up as "04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 3160 (rev 83)" using # lspci)

I'm currently installing CentOS7 into a VM to check it out and compare. I'm going a bit nuts now, hehe.

Stay tuned for more posts on how I continue this technical preparation...