Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal

I am releasing a handy little tool I have been working on called VPNAutoConnect . It does a couple of simple things Windows won't let you do (at least not easily): - automatically reconnects to a VPN when the connection is lost - connects to a VPN on computer start-up - logs VPN connection events for debugging I designed this tool because I have been using a VPN for a while but I randomly get disconnected. I wish Windows offered an option to automatically reconnect but strangely there isn't an easy, straightforward way to do that (as of today). With this tool, not only my VPN connection is started when I boot my computer, but it always reconnects automatically after I get those random disconnects. This is a free open source program designed with Visual Studio Community 2015. It requires the .NET framework 4.5.2, and it makes uses of the DotRas library. - Download program from here : vpnautoconnect-1.0.zip  ( SHA1 ) - Download sources from here : vpnautoconnect-1.0...

Since Windows 7, for some reason VPN support in new Windows versions has annoyingly decreased in quality. You can't create shortcuts to VPNs on the desktop or in the start menu anymore; you can't set up a VPN connection to automatically connect on start up; and with Windows 10 there is even a bug (at the time of writing this article) that makes you click on another connection item in the list before the Connect button appears. The simplest way to achieve automatic VPN connection on computer start-up is to create a batch/cmd file with the following command: rasdial "VPN Connection" username password Where: - rasdial is the name of the command-line utility that will perform the connection - replace "VPN Connection" by the actual name of the VPN connection - replace username by your actual VPN user name - replace password by your actual VPN password If you want the VPN connection to be started when you log on, simply place this batch script into ...

I have lived in China for two years now and I must say I am absolutely disgusted by the new censorship measures enforced by the Chinese government. Especially this new one. Here's how the story begins. Late April, before the Easter holidays, I was still enjoying live TV streaming from french channels through my regular VPN. It wasn't too fast but good enough to stream correctly without much buffering. When I got back from holiday early May, I noticed that all my VPNs still worked but the speed had become incredibly bad , I could barely access websites - let alone stream live video. I thought it would be temporary or that maybe peering between China Telecom and Europe was saturated. But it got worse. At work (I work at a foreign school) ever since I got back from holiday, our connection would get shut down every now and then . Nearly every single foreign website (most IP addresses outside of China) would be unreachable for hours. We decided to investigate the issue with our ...