Firewalla VPN Server worked flawlessly to bypass China's great firewall

VPN
1

Just traveled to China (Shanghai and Beijing) for work and struggled with getting a stable connection through third party VPN providers. Mullvad VPN, IVPN etc. technically worked, but their servers just kept getting overloaded at peak times. Couldn’t stream anything, often couldn’t even stable phone calls without intermittent disconnects. Constantly tried to hop to different servers or countries, but had little luck.

I had just assumed that I wouldn’t be able to connect to my own VPN server back home in SoCal, but holy cow, Firewalla’s VPN Server worked perfectly, from both hotels in Shanghai and in Beijing. Ultra-stable connection. Never any problems. And of course, nothing was blocked because it just connected to the endpoints from a private fiber connection.

Truly amazing experience, makes me appreciate my Firewalla so much more.

Mac/iOS Client I use is Passepartout – loads in the .conf file without any issues and doesn’t eat up too many resources. Highly recommend.

2

The protocols are the same, either Wireguard or OpenVPN. Endpoints belonging to popular VPN providers are ‘blacklisted’, not exactly blocked but throttled. Your residential VPN server is fine because it is private.

3

Yeah I’m glad you didn’t end up in jail for life lol. Worth it to get past Chinese censorship though… or not…

4

FWIW eventually the great firewall appears to react and will severely throttle or block your residential IP country wide.

It doesn’t even have to be a VPN — I had a residentially hosted SSL webmail app and it worked for around 2 days and then stopped.

5

XI is going to come looking for u. Man U better go into hiding now

6

Yep. I posted about this a year ago when I went to Shenzhen. I forgot to whitelist WeChat pay so it works there but when I did, zero issues.

7

Newbie here sorry. Was the passepartout app easy to use? Trying to figure out how to bypass on my next trip

8

What does Passepartout offer over the WireGuard app, out of curiosity?

9

Can someone help me set firewalla vpn? I purchased express and nord and they didn’t work so I had to request a refund. I need your help guys!! PM me

10

yea i find it very easy to use. you just import the .conf file that the firewalla app gives you, and thats it.

11

I had issues with Wireguard saying it’s active and connected but traffic not being routed through it. Not sure what the issue was, but then looked for an alternative. The Wireguard app did work just fine for me before, however.

12

whatcha need? firewalla app is pretty intuitive for setting one up. VPN Server → Wireguard → Setup → Add A Client.

That will spit out a *.conf file that you then load into an app that is a wireguard VPN client on the device you wanna send through the VPN. Either the Wireguard App itself, or something like Passepartout.

13

Interesting. I purchased that app years ago when I was using OpenVPN but stopped using it at some point when I switched to WireGuard. I’ll have to check it out again.

14

This happens to me on networks with UDP blocked.