[SOLVED] VPN Needed?

[GardenGuy1]

My wife just went to another country. She teaches college and is unable access her college's website. She received a message that said "This site can't be reached. fs.harvard.edu took too long to respond. Try *Checking the connection *Checking the proxy and firewall *Running Windows Network Diagnostics. ERR_TIMED_OUT" She heard somewhere that her college might be blocking connections from other countries. Does this sound like a problem that would be fixed by using a VPN? Also, she currently is connecting with a hotspot from a cell phone purchased by someone in that country. Any suggestions about how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. You'll notice that I said above that the message said "fs.harvard.edu". It's not really Harvard - I just changed the name of the college for her privacy. It really says "fs.schoolname.edu".

 

[Ralston18]

Your wife should check with "fs.schoolname.edu" college. And her colleagues as well,

If the college is indeed blocking connections from countries she is probably not the only person having problems.

The college should be able to tell her/you what is needed to gain secure access.

 

[GardenGuy1]

Your wife should check with "fs.schoolname.edu" college. And her colleagues as well,

If the college is indeed blocking connections from countries she is probably not the only person having problems.

The college should be able to tell her/you what is needed to gain secure access.

What does it mean to the check proxy settings? What would I be looking for?

 

[bill001g]

It is highly unlikely you have a proxy setup and don't know it. Proxy is kinda a form of vpn but it doesn't really work that well with modern HTTPS. It used to be a setting only in the browser but microsoft explore sets it someplace in the system and the browser can choose to use it or not. You can check the setting the browser, I forget how since it is not used much anymore. It should break more than just 1 website.

It is much more likely it is some generic communication problem and that message just means the communication doesn't work.

You could try a simple command line ping of the ip address. If that works but the browser does not I would suspect a server issue or they maybe actually blocking it. In most cases you would think instead of just refusing the connection they would put up a error screen telling you they were blocking you.

I don't know how you actually can tell. A VPN is going to be the simplest thing to try. I doubt they go to the trouble of blocking all the vpn services to try to prevent people from getting around the block. I would more suspect the server is broken in some way.

Note if you are in china then it is far more likely it is the government firewall causing the problem.

 

[GardenGuy1]

The site that she can't reach is an https site. I'm wondering if the hotspot that she is using a with a Huawei phone is somehow stopping this site from working correctly? If it wasn't for COVID, she could go somewhere where she could use regular wifi to test this theory, but at the moment she can't. Also, I looked up the problem of not being able to reach https sites with a hotspot and found this:

Thanks, but the problem is solved now!
I changed my APN protocol to IPV4 in APN settings! (It was IPV4/IPV6). And everything worked like a charm!
Thanks by the way for helping! Got to know many things!
Thank you for helping!

I don't know what this means or how to do it. If anyone has a explanation of what that means, I'd appreciate hearing it.

 

[bill001g]

It is a setting in the phone but I never really mess with my phone much. If it is a ipv4/ipv6 thing you should be able to turn off the ipv6 support in your pc. If it is a problem using web browsers on the phone itself then it would have to be change on the phone and they all seem to be a little different.
Not sure HTTPS actually works fine over IPv6. The problem with IPv6 is more that it is not well supported everywhere and many times does not perform as well as ipv4.

 

[GardenGuy1]

It looks like she does need a VPN. She shared a friend's VPN and that worked. But she can't continue to use the friend's. Any recommendations for a good VPN to choose for her purposes?

 

[bill001g]

A vpn is almost impossible to recommend because it all depends on how good the connectivity is between your ISP and the vpn provider and the connection between the vpn provider and the destination site.

This is almost you have to try it to find out.

In general you get what you pay for. Since you are not concerned with doing illegal stuff you don't really care what country the VPN provider is in and how much records they keep. All the very large vpn providers like nord or pia or express cost about the same. You need to try just 1 month to start but the prices are much cheaper when you buy mulitple months.

Avoid any so called free vpn, there really is no such thing they have to make the cost of their network back somehow. The worst offenders have been caught running bitcoin miners on peoples machines.

This tends to be very tough to get good recommendations. The vast majority of reviewes even from very large publications are fake, companies pay to have themselves included. You will for example see a well know vpn company rated as no 1 and then some completely unkown company rated as number 2 3 4 etc.

All you can do with vpn list is look at them and ignore the actual rating you will see the large names in almost all the lists.

 

[Ralston18]

This:

"It looks like she does need a VPN. She shared a friend's VPN and that worked ."

What VPN does her friend use? Also - ISP and country?