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Month: December 2019
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AdGuard – blocking ads and trackers at the OS level
Everyone loves ad blockers, so long as your livelihood does not depend on advertising. Pretty much everyone I know is running some sort of ad blockers in their browsers, such as uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus; and the newer Firefox browser even comes with an in-built ad filtering engine! (Which is great btw) But browser…
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1-year free cloud instance with 3TB transfer
Came across a free 12 months VPS offer. You get a full year’s worth of cloud instance with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 40GB SSD as well as 3TB data transfer. That is 750 hours per month of free usage, which you can either leave it on 24/7, or spin up 750 instances for 1 hour.…
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SpeedTest Singapore script
One of the first few things you would do after getting your hands on a new cloud instance is probably to run a few bandwidth measurements on speedtest.net. I certainly do. But it gets a bit tedious having to find out the Singapore servers without a GUI. Fueled by my own laziness, I have created…
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ViewQwest has crappy network peerings into China. Period.
ViewQwest. China. Slow. You can make any sentence with these three words without negating them and the resulting statement will be true.
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AWS Lightsail US$3.5/mo instance reviewed
Network routing to China left quite a bit to be desired, congestion happens with a large number of packet loss during evening peak hours, typically from 8pm onwards. If your purpose of using Lightsail is to serve web content to an audience within China or is pulling contents from China servers, you may want to…
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My favorite Traceroute tool
Traceroute helps you quickly find out the network path and measure the transit delays of packets across the internet. The standard implementation displays only the IP or rDNS entries, which may not allow you to identify the geographic path at first glance.
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Allow only Cloudflare CDN servers to your web servers
We love to use Cloudflare CDN because it improves latency and uptime, and the price is just right (free) for the starter pack. Normally, a web server’s ports 80 and 443 would be opened to the public internet, with access restricted by selected IP ranges by either ASN or country, depending on what the administrator…
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Comparing cloud instance performance across different providers
If you have been in the market of shopping for a cloud instance, you will notice the offerings are deceptively similar: 1 vCPU + 1GB memory with a 20GB disk and 1TB bandwidth, for the same price. Are they really similar though? Far from it.
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Using your cloud instance as a proxy with Dante server
Let’s say you have a Cloud VM lying around with, it is entirely possible to turn it into a personal proxy for your internet traffic. It is probably not going to help you unlock region-protected content since services like Netflix and Hulu would probably have blocked the IP range operated by hosting service providers, but…
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Quick config and optimization of your cloud instance
So you’ve got your first Linux VM, hurray! Here is a quick prep guide to get it up to speed. In this example (and throughout this blog), I’ll assume you’re using the Debian-based Ubuntu 18.04 LTS – which is ideal as it comes with newer software packages and is quite a bit easier to manage…