Ask HN: Moving overseas to a 250kb/s connection, any life hacks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Moving overseas to a 250kb/s connection, any life hacks?

I do freelance software engineering, and my wife accepted a job with the US State Department overseas in a country with low bandwidth/flaky internet (the power goes off frequently too). Fortunately the bulk of my work is coding which can be done offline. However, I still maintain web servers, use GitHub, Slack and email for communication on projects.

Any hacks for low bandwidth/flaky internet? I'm wondering about tools to heavily cache webpages, maybe setting up a proxy or VPN that does server-side compression? Anyone have experience dealing with this?

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Depending on the details, 250kb/s might not be that bad.

I used to work remotely on 56kb dial-up, which was in reality never better than about 46kb/s. Way back in school I had 2400 baud. Now THAT was slow.

Best to have a remote machine on a good network, that you ssh to for anything that needs high bandwidth. Use tmux or screen (also helpful if you get disconnected unexpectedly). Then you only need enough bandwidth to draw the screen updates.

If you do need to use VNC or Remote Desktop dial the colors and resolution down to as low as you can stand.

If you're doing lots of remote connections, I have found mosh (https://mosh.mit.edu/) to be a useful replacement for / supplement to ssh.

From their landing page:

Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.

I feel for you, those kinds of speeds would be awful to live with.

Here are some of the things that came to mind for web browsing: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-compression http://www.opera.com/turbo https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/silk/

Depending on the cost of connections there, you can also combine them with something like the TP-LINK TL-ER5120. We use one in our office here in Vietnam to combine 3 connections (supports up to 4) and it works very well.

Oh, excellent! Very cool, thank you.

Using on mac while on expensive and high latency data

1) Mosh - access to servers

2) DNSmasq - cache of DNS responses

3) Squidman - Squid web cache proxy with UI http://squidman.net/squidman/

4) SShuttle - Easy poorman's vpn [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle]

Much better experience.

If you're dealing with Unixy systems, resort to the command line and also use something like tmux or screen to preserve the session when (not if) you're getting disconnected.

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