One of my company's clients is based in China (my company is based in the UK). We have a service agreement with them, and regularly perform a number of maintenance tasks for them. The nature of their work requires a lot of physical machinery, and we provide a product which controls & monitors that machinery (switching engines on/off, checking levels of different gases, monitoring output productivity, etc).
The product we supplied them with is a piece of hardware, which they have connected to their network- giving us access to the various bits of machinery & other hardware on that network.
We usually connect to our product through a router which they have given us the IP address for, however, we have recently been unable to connect to the IP address of that router, and so are unable to see our device/ perform any of the maintenance tasks that they are requesting of us.
Having had similar problems to this a number of times in the past, we have found ways around it through using different combinations of OS/ browser/ browser version to connect to the router's IP address. However, this time none of the combinations appear to be working...
When trying to browse to the router's IP address at the moment, I get an error in the browser:
This site can't be reached.
xxx.xx.xxx.xxx took too long to repond
Try:
- Checking the connection - Checking the proxy and the firewall - Running Windows Network Diagnostics
I get this error from all browsers on my local machine (Windows 10- Chrome, Firefox & Opera) and also from a Virtual Machine (CentOS 7- Chrome).
Given that all of these methods failed, I decided to try using a proxy server to access the address, but when I did that, I got an error which said:
Error: The requested resource could not be loaded. libcurl returned the error: error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure
Can someone explain what this error sslv3 alert handshake failure means? Is there a way that I can resolve/ 'bypass' the errors so that I can access the router?
Maybe this IP address has been picked up & blocked by the Chinese firewall? If so, is there a way to get round it?
Edit
I have done a bit more investigation (I've only been at the company about 8 months- so this was something I hadn't needed to look into until now), and it seems our old VPN was tunnelled via SSH on an old server.
Our new VPN was working until the end of February (not tunnelled via SSH, on a new server), but has stopped working since then.
It seems that China blocked the VPN at the end of February.
We have asked our client for access via an external IP address (no VPN), so that we can connect to a router and port forward from there to our device.
At one of our client's other sites in China, we have created a tunnel via SSH for Open VPN (on our device), the SSH connects our device to our new server- giving us the 'tunnel' that we can use. Open VPN connects to the tunnel/ communicates via the tunnel, and the Open VPN packets are hidden by SSH.
Our data is sent by SSH (encrypted) & the data type means that the Chinese government have to let it through.
Is there any other way that we can get around this, or will we have to wait for the external IP address for the router from our client (could be several weeks before we receive this from them) ?
