In Which My Computer Problems are Still More Complicated than the Average Person's Computer Problems

At my new home, I get an average internet latency of ~200 ms.  At my old house, I was getting, on a good day, between 400ms and 600ms.  To put this in perspective, websites load up to around 2000ms latency, but after around 800 ms you have to turn off images and be really patient.  Above 600ms video streaming isn't really worth the trouble and above 400ms it requires significant buffering time.  The point of all those numbers is to explain that at 200ms a lot more is possible on the internet.

Turing bless some amazingly generous friends of mine for providing me with 1) access to a stateside machine with permission to use it as a proxy server provided I set up RSA authentication rather than passwording into it (it's a reasonable stipulation), and 2) the password to a Netflix account with unlimited streaming.  The reason I care is that a lot of fun stuff from the states is only available to US IPs, for example, Netflix, a lot of Youtube videos (including Funimation's entire catalog which they tantalizingly uploaded to Youtube and then geoblocked outside the US.  Jerks.), the Daily Show, anything on NBC, and Pandora my favorite music streaming station.     Needless to say, having access to this stateside machine made me really excited.  Until I decided to check the internet speed on it and almost cried when I realized what I lost by leaving the US.  6ms latencies?!

Getting access to everything was pretty straightforward except that I've never set up a proxy server. I am the dumb kid of the CS department.  Nonetheless, with Google I can do anything.  The main issue was getting Netflix, because I can't run that natively under Linux.  Netflix uses some magical special proprietary player that doesn't play on Linux.  Fortunately, this is one of the things I can use a virtual windows machine for.  That becomes much more complicated with proxy servers involved, because even with the proxy as the system wide network setting on the host, it is not immediately obvious how to get a guest machine to use the proxy.  At least, not on VirtualBox it's not.  This shouldn't be a huge issue for me, really, because weirdly enough I am one of the world's experts on networking in virtual machines.   Also, I now have Pandora to provide me with music while I work on this.  But because I have a tendency to hack my way through problems rather than really acquiring expertise it became easier to install Cygwin on the VM so I could have a Linux-emulator to set up a second proxy server specifically for the VM (okay, so it's probably possible to do a proxy setup and Windows, but I understand how to do it on Linux)  Which is when I figured out that Cygwin's ssh key authentication is a little strange but ssh has helpful debugging output.  Another reason to do this out of a Linux emulator rather than using Windows system tools, I don't know how to troubleshoot stuff on Windows.   Anyway, I am now running a proxy out of a Linux emulator on a Windows virtual machine hosted on a Linux machine.  Which is running the same proxy at the same time.  Go me.  The amazing thing is the virtual machine and emulation isn't enough of a bottleneck to make streaming video off Netflix impractical.    

I realize most people that I know who read this blog don't care about any of this, but I had a good time.