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

ams6110 · on July 12, 2016

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.

privong · on July 12, 2016

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.

asher_ · on July 12, 2016

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.

nathancahill · on July 12, 2016

Oh, excellent! Very cool, thank you.

nwrk · on July 12, 2016

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.

TheMog · on July 12, 2016

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.