Foreign Travel Network Access

 

Consistent with my generally sunny disposition, I find it very amusing to get messages from people—who are supposed to be enjoying a vacation—that they cannot access our network or email from a foreign country.  As I’ve often said, I feed on tears, lack empathy, and my favorite phrase is “I told you so.”  Anyone who thinks they are going to get sympathy from me when they are “working” in the Bahamas or have decided to vacation in an Eastern Bloc country is just not paying attention.  I do appreciate the unexpected joy my colleagues add to my existence by trying anyway. 

But – I told you so.  Y’all know that we have some serious security surrounding our network to prevent the very attacks that Biden and Putin discussed only 24 hours ago.  We don’t really have a lot of international business, so we pretty much block connections from anywhere that isn’t here using a firewall bigger and stronger than the one guarded by the Night’s Watch.  Nevertheless, there is always an expression of surprise when a connection to email cannot be obtained in Belarus or the like.  It just makes my day.

Anyway, there is a fix.  Once I have my fill of joy, I still like to take care of you and that also makes me happy.  If you know you’re going to be out of the country, you need to plan ahead just a little bit.  Know that your email and RDC will not work anywhere except in the United States.  We can accommodate you, but we need to know what your home base IP address will be where you are going.  You can tell us in advance or find out when you get there by going to this site: http://www.whatismyip.com/.  It will work anywhere.  Send the result to iPower and they’ll clear that through.  You will not be able to wander around Prague sending snot-grams in response to missives from opposing attorneys, but you will be able to see your email when you return to your hotel or B&B.

Now, if you really want to send snot grams from the cute cafe on the corner, there is a work around.  We've had a couple of testers use a Virtual Private Network application (VPN) and set that to show an IP address in the US.  Sure enough, this tricks the firewall into thinking you're in the US and avoids the block.

The way you do this is probably different depending on the VPN you are using.  These are subscription services and there are many of them.  I use Bitdefender.  There is also Nord VPN, IP Vanish, Cyber Ghost, Surfshark, and Private Internet Access.  Those are the top services at the moment according to people who are even geekier than I am.  Once you have the service set up, you should be able to tell it where you want your IP address to look like it is coming from.  Set it to the US and you should bypass the firewall.