crackGFW

In this tutorial, I will introduce the procedures to set up shadowsocks tp jump the Great Fire Wall (GFW) in China. Apart from the shadowsocks, we also need to have a VPS as the server, and we use Digital Ocean in this article.

Set up Digital Ocean

*You can register an account with some pro with https://m.do.co/c/861b73e67ea5. Note students can get $50 credits from education pack (if you do not have github account, please register with your university email), then you can get the promo code from the https://education.github.com/pack/offers#digitalocean like

Then go to the Digital Ocean to register an account. Note that you may need to bind your credit card or use Paypel to pay $5 to finish the registration.
After that, create a droplet by selecting CentOS, $5/Month size (it is enough for this work), New York (or other places by testing speed in http://speedtest-nyc3.digitalocean.com/).
Finally, you should get the IP address of the server as: *
You can ping the IP address by the cmd in windows to check if you can access to the server. If so, you can get results like
You will also get the password from the email sent to you.

Set up Shadowsocks server

In Windows, please download Putty and then open the software and type "root@yourIP" in the new session. And then type the password, and create new password for your server (You can use the Terminal in Linux/Mac).
Install all dependencies:

yum install python-setuptools && easy_install pip
pip install shadowsocks

Then set up the shadowsocks by creating a configuration file:

vi /etc/ssconfig.json

Press 'i' for the insert mode and copy the following content:

{
    "server": "yourServerIP", 
    "server_port": 8388,
    "local_port": 1080, 
    "password": "yourPassword", 
    "timeout": 600,
    "method": "aes-256-cfb",
    "fast_open": false
}

If you want to open different ports with different passwords, you can change the config file as:

{
	"server":"yourServerIP",
	"port_password": {
		"8387": "yourPassword1",
		"8388": "yourPassword2",
		"8389": "yourPassword3"
	},
	"local_port": 1080, 
	"timeout":600,
	"method":"aes-256-cfb",
	"fast_open": false
}

After that, click "ESC" button, and type ":wq" to save and quit. Finally, we launch the server in the background by typing

ssserver -c /etc/ssconfig.json -d start

You can check whether your server successfully runs by typing

netstat -antlp | grep 8388

and the results should be like

Set up the shadowsocks client

Download the client from https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-windows/releases/download/4.0.6/Shadowsocks-4.0.6.zip
Install and fill in the content by
Then set the client as global proxy i.e.,
Now you can try to access to Google, Twitter, Youtube ... in your browser in the windows. You can also download the client for different platforms (Already successfully tested):
- Mac new
- Mac old
- Android

PAC file

PAC (Proxy auto-config) is used to show that what websites that we need to use shadowsocks. Because it will be faster to directly visit Chinese websites without Shadowsocks. So, you can add all websites that you cannot access directly or slowly into the pac.txt. The rules are explained in detail in http://www.cnblogs.com/edward2013/p/5560836.html .

NOTE:

If you cannot break the GFW (e.g., cannot access to Google) for more than one day, it indicates that the server IP is blocked by GFW. You need to destroy the Droplets and launch a new one following the procedures above.
There are also some alternative VPS providers such as Amazon EC2, Vultr, Bandwagon, you can refer to the tutorial to set up the Shadowsocks. I selected Digital Ocean due to the $50 student credits.
Apart from Shadowsocks, you can also adopt the ShadowsocksR which is a deviation of Shadowsocks and claims more robust security.

TODOS:

Intelligent PAC tool like MEOW https://www.loyalsoldier.me/an-easy-guideline-to-fuck-the-gfw/
Speed up the server such as
Some network protocols or algorithms can speed up the Shadowsocks such as Google BBR or server speeder

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