Not blocked on the DNS level. I have tried to use a DNS other than my ISP’s. They even go out of their way and use DPI (deep packet inspection) to scramble all internet traffic that resembles VoIP (which is banned here) and VPNs.

It’s a constant game of cat and mouse with VPNs to find one that works only for it to be scrambled/blocked shortly after subscribing to it. :(

I’ve even tried renting a server, installing CentOS and running OpenVPN but that got identified and scrambled like 5 days into running that server.

[–] CriticalMiss 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

First of all, don’t use CentOS, it’s 2023 (and EOL)

Second of all, you can abuse the AWS free tier to host your VPN since they assign a dynamic IP for all the ec2 instances, so turning it off and on again gives you a new IP.

Also, don’t use OpenVPN, use WireGuard.

EDIT: Additionally, I believe that when they notice all traffic originating from your IP is going to a single IP somewhere else in the world it’s automatically marked as a VPN and then blocked. You should try running a split configuration where traffic to lemmy.blahaj.zone (23.20.240.121/32, 54.81.97.116/32) is routed through your VPN and everything else leaves as usual.

[–] alsiniz 3 points 1 year ago

The OpenVPN project was many years ago on CentOS, I haven’t dabbled in Linux distros for many years now and have no idea what distro would be ideal this kind of project today.

Duly noted about WireGuard! If they have a windows client that supports split tunnelling then I am definitely going to try AWS + WireGuard. Will look into it when I’m home.

Thank you for the advice!