Status.app: censorship penetration failed?

Status Mobile
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I have read, that Status app doesn’t work in Belarus right now, where the internet looks hard limited and censored last days. Some VPN’s are working, telegram is working sometimes, Status doesn’t work at all.

Any experience about behavior of the Status app under hard internet conditions?
Is Status app battle-tested at all?

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We can do more.

Do you know of anyone we can reach out to support a setup? Or if you know someone, please send them here.

Essentially anyone can set up a mailserver to provide history of message send while a client is offline. If the issue is reaching a mailserver, that might be an option. Else, we need to understand the problem first.

I wouldn’t call it battle tested. There was a ‘chaos unicorn day’ last year, where all mailservers (a.k.a. history nodes) hosted by Status were switched off to test if we could continue using the application: https://discuss.status.im/t/chaos-unicorn-day-live-discussion/1123

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@ethernian if you get the chance, we would very much appreciate to learn if the status app works if users reconfigure their DNS (for example to use google’s public resolver, ipv4 8.8.8.8 or
8.8.4.4) or while using a proxy/vpn. When using a proxy/vpn, please make sure to use one that uses an external dns resolver.

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Not sure what “battle-tested” means, but if your government is blocking each and every single on of the waku nodes and history nodes we run - and we have a bunch of them, see https://fleets.status.im/ - then there are are only two solutions:

  • We as Status have to run more nodes to increase the probability of one of them working, but our budget is not infinite, and blocking more IPs is trivial
  • You can try running a node with a VPN connection to allow it to connect to other nodes

You can test the nodes you can find on https://fleets.status.im/ with something like nmap or Angry IP Scanner to see if they are indeed blocked.

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@andrey made me aware that apparently they are blocking specific ports, like 443 for HTTPS, so it might be worth adding a mailserver using it’s alternative port which is 30504.

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FWIW, please also check the conversation in Join #status in Status Access to mailservers seems to be ok during the day, using VPN, not after 18:00 local time. Perhaps ports are blocked at this time?

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If what you want is for communication to work within your country you could try running your own waku/history nodes and bootnodes:

But currently there’s issues with adding custom bootnodes in the settings, not sure about the details and you can read the description here:

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One option for communication inside the country would be running a node share its address with others and use it in Profile->Advanced->Bootnodes

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@andrey those instructions do not explain how to run a bootnode, just a waku node. I posted the bootnode instructions above.

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It would be good if one of these nodes connect together with nodes outside the censored-web so you are not isolated from communication of outside. I am not sure if that happens automatically after some time, but for sure, if one node in your network can connect at same time to local nodes and external nodes through a VPN, then all messages will be relayed to inside your network.

So you probably want to run a bootnode and a mailserver in your censored-web, and one relay node connected to both this censored web and to a VPN.