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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon filecoin-project

Explain issues with the Great Firewall.

Open johnnymatthews opened this issue 3 years ago • 4 comments

Filecoin is currently facing some issues with the Great Firewall of China, namely transfers slow to a crawl when sending/receiving anything more than a few MB in or out of China. Because of this, storage users will likely see better connections and transfers by using a miner within their own region. The issue will likely get fixed at some point, but for now we should point this out to storage users.

johnnymatthews avatar Dec 01 '20 23:12 johnnymatthews

this is only true for online deals and data transfers

terrabytes of data rsync/scp fine through the firewall

f8-ptrk avatar Jan 15 '21 13:01 f8-ptrk

@ribasushi do you happen to know if this is still an issue, or did the Lotus engineers perform some magic and fix it?

johnnymatthews avatar Jun 10 '21 00:06 johnnymatthews

this will always be an issue i think. traffic crossing the gwf is always slow.

my 15th of january might be not correct and we are just lucky to have a direct connection to a china telecom fiber in germany.

f8-ptrk avatar Jun 10 '21 00:06 f8-ptrk

Digging into this issue a little further, I've found out that dealing with the Great Firewall (GFW) isn't specifically a Filecoin/Lotus issue. Sustained data streaming in/out of China is tricky since the GFW blocks anything other than email and minimal traffic.

A basic strategy to get around the GFW is to use proxy nodes and encrypt the data. A combination of VPNs and proxy servers usually works. However, some folks across the internet have said that you can pretty much guarantee this set up failing at least once a day.

But as you mentioned @f8-ptrk, some connections will just work. If you're able to transfer TiBs of data out of China, but others can't, then it may be a country-to-country problem.

I think our best bet with this issue is to point out that dealing with data in/outbound of China-based miners could be tricky and that clients should take the location of miners into account (pretty sure we already point out the closer the miner, the better the up/down rates).

Tasks

  • [ ] Explain why Filecoin users may experience issues getting data in and out of China.
  • [ ] Point out this isn't a Filecoin specific issue.
  • [ ] Link to other resources discussing this problem and potential circumvention strats.

johnnymatthews avatar Jun 15 '21 14:06 johnnymatthews