I am in Shanghai a couple days and it is quite inconvenient with many websites blocked. I heard about “breaking” the wall but I didn’t realize it is quite fast and easy. All one needs is a software called goagent. It takes advantage of the google app engine. Here, I will assume that ones already have created a google app engine application before. If not, it is easy to do and there are many guides for that.
I am using it on my linux box LTS 12.04. The goagent team has created a very good guide on its site. I have encountered few problems following it. It appears that one can’t install gevent automatically for 12.04 and have to use the manual route. And I didn’t try to start the proxy automatically. I just run it in a terminal using
python proxy.py
instead. In any case, I will only be here for a couple days. I don’t really see any inconvenience running it from terminal rather than having it to start up automatically.
In terms of browser setup, I use chromium (chrome should work too) and SwitchySharp. One would want to look for an option file SwitchyOptions.bak and import it directly to SwitchySharp. It can be easily found with a search.
The only issue I had is that it didn’t load facebook and youtube correctly. It appeared that it was due to some certification problems. But it can be fixed easily following this post.