Help changing my Chinese router settings

[ChTTay]

I recently purchase a vpn. It works really well at my workplace and gives a good, stable connection for many hours. The speed is good enough for what I want to do [browsing mostly, maybe small downloads].

 

However, at home the connection isn't good at all. I will get 5-10 minutes at best. After that I need to reconnect to a different server but sometimes I cannot reconnect again for a while.

 

On their site, it says I should make sure that QoS and SPI firewall are turned off/disabled. In my Chinese TENDA router I see nothing with those letters in it. I am using windows 8.1

 

Could this setting have a different name in Chinese? I checked a dictionary and it suggest SPI Firewall in Chinese should SPI 防火墙.

 

Any help appreciated.

[m000gle]

tl;dr:

 

Welcome to China

 

 

Long Version:

 

A stateful firewall, one which performs stateful packet inspection (SPI), is 状态防火墙; however, it could just as easily use the English derived acronym you mentioned.

 

That said, I sincerely doubt either your firewall or quality of service (QOS) settings are the cause of your VPN's connectivity issues, and less reliable connection to it from home.  The former's  state-aware nature should  open the ports and actually help maintain a connection, with a timeout being highly unlikely unless you have zero VPN activity for an extended period of time; the latter, essentially just a tool for scheduling and prioritization of packets through the router, again should not prevent or drop a VPN connection and if anything should place this type of packet in a relatively high priority category.  There is nothing inherently wrong with turning either feature off; but your VPN provider has likely suggested this merely as a first step of troubleshooting, to rule them out as a potential cause, as opposed to a realistic solution to your problem.

 

Far more likely is that your workplace and home connections are dealing with significantly different packet sniffing, VPN/SSH packet recognition, URL/IP blocking etc.  Your workplace's business ISP will likely not filter the VPN connection, lest it interfere with the business' legitimate/legal use of the technology. The consumer ISP you have at home likely filters this far more aggressively, blocking the connection either at the time of negotiation or once it detects an encrypted connection, to a foreign IP address, lasting more than just a few minutes; and, once detected, blocking the destination IP (at least temporarily) should it not be on the GFW blocklist already.  Or, far less nefariously but just as likely, your home connection may simply suck and suffer from sufficient packet loss that maintaining a stable connection state to a foreign IP is difficult.

 

This is all likely beyond your control, but by testing different IP's, protocols, providers etc, you can probably find a service which works well enough, most of the time; while recognition of your powerlessness will help ensure you have a backup plan, don't rely too heavily on services which require a VPN, and avoid the immense frustration when your firewall jumping eventually (and hopefully temporarily) fails.

[skylee]

I like "recognition of your powerlessness".

[ChTTay]

Thanks for your good explanation. I am not sure about my workplace internet package, we aren't an office but a school so it may be we are just using a standard internet connection but with more bandwidth. There isn't any way I know of that I can check what package we have. Asking our I.T department will be fruitless.

 

 I would add that in 36 months in China, I've had a VPN for 6 of those. I got this one to stand any chance of downloading something that wouldn't work without one. I paid a block of 3 months but they have a 14 day money back thing so If it's not sorted in a few days I will ask them to honor that.

 

If i could find a VPN that actually worked, I would like to set up a blog. I was going to use WEEBLY but it appears to be semi-blocked now. I can't find another platform... Anyway, ...

 

Any more advice on the original topic would be grand

 

+++++++EDIT++++++

They have given me a refund.

[obiwan]

Could you tell me what kind of VPN connection are you using?

[ChTTay]

Tried PPP, IPSEC, OPEN VPN and another one I don't recall.

 

It's okay, my ISP contract finishes soon so I'm thinking of switching to China Unicom, it's more expensive but I think it might be more legit. I am sure my current ISP doesn't give the amount of bandwidth they say. I also can't torrent with them and VPNs don't work. Both of these work at my school however, which is a 10 minute bus ride away.