My fast pay VPN expired, so I had to log on to the internet using a slow free VPN to then buy a new subscription for my fast pay VPN.

I have scary VPN disconnects making me wonder truly how secure they are. On enterprise level they won't let anything over 128bit AES come into the countr which tells me they probably have 128bit cracking down to a science. A few months ago I was in Chengdu and got an email saying one of my very good friends just had a baby so without thinking I hit facebook on my phone with a chinese sim. DOH. I power up my laptop, used a pay VPN(PIA), and couldn't get a connection at all. I switched to another lesser known VPN payware(your freedom) and magic I was through. I made it through about 5 pictures on facebook when the VPN failed and refused to let me connect again. Without thinking I connected behind my ASA which has a leashed line from Shanghai to Chengdu, then another to Shenzhen in a ghost locker that is trunked in hong kong to circumvent the worst firewall that goes out of the undersea line at Taiwan. Simply visiting facebook put the line "under review" for about 6 hours, almost got my panties in a bunch over that one.

I left it alone after that. It took pulling teeth and nails to get a reasonable line and don't want to jeopardize business. We gigabiz 500Mb bidirectional that went out of Taiwan. Anywhere in China I actually got decent speeds, about 150-200Mb, but the instant I tried to go through to Taiwan it went down to Kb/s and 50% packet loss on a good day. I tried all sorts of hardware load balancing, had 4 lines at one time, numerous different appliances(suck ass Riverbed!) claiming they could help, but nothing worked. I ended up with the leased line to Shenzhen which trunks in Hong Kong, it's only 50Mb but I get every ounce of the line with zero packet loss and no hassles, unless I go to facebook :p Then our sales office heard about my great line so I had to give them a 50meg, to me and upgrade the other to 100meg. It's $30K a year, but at least it works.,

It's scary in this day and age that internet is still treated so poorly. It's a cost of doing business these days. I run leased fiber between buildings at HQ, the buildings that have SAN nodes have a few bundles of fiber just for them. I have a 1Gb plan for the ocmpany. I give all users 100Mb for playing on the web(I do increase it for special events), 100Mb dedicated for mail traffic, 500Mb for my offsite SAN replication, and the other 300 floats between telephony and retrieving data from subcons. At home I run a primary 100/20 from Comcast and a backup Uverse 45/6 line as well as sim'd 4g laptop and a phone if the poop really hits the fan.

ok sorry, ramblings of a drunken IT weenie!

/r/firstworldproblems Thread Parent