I was recently in Egypt for two weeks of vacation. As I’m running my own “bare-metal” root server, I needed to take care of it even while on vacation, to look after updates and alerts on a daily basis.
So I prepared myself well, and I would like to briefly let you know what I did, and what worked, and what didn’t work.
Preparation
First, I set up WireGuard on my server. It’s a UDP-based VPN that is very lightweight and fast. By chance I found out, though, that Egypt doesn’t work in Egypt, as it’s being blocked by Egypt’s authorities. đ
So I looked for alternatives and came across Outline. Outline is not actually a “real” VPN, but a proxy using the Shadowsocks protocol, which was explicitly designed to circumvent internet censorship. It can also proxy UDP traffic.
That is one amazing piece of software.
For certain Cloud Service Providers (Digital Ocean (just $4/mo.!), Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), you can literally install it with a single click in a desktop app, the Outline Manager, which is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.