Any pitfalls to operating Imp devices behind Great Firewall?

General
1

Hi,

We’re considering some deployments in China and were curious if there were any known issues we should be aware of. Electric Imp have recommended a factory accelerator box for us to improve packet loss during the blessing process at our Chinese factory, for example.

But for production devices out in the field, should we expect any challenges connecting to the Imp Cloud from behind the Great Firewall?

Thanks!

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2

If you’re doing production devices in China, then contact us. We have a chinese subsidiary and hence have servers within AWS China.

Production devices in China would be built with China-only keys and DNS - they wouldn’t connect to any US/European servers. Staying within China is the best way to address these issues.

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3

Thanks Hugo–this is very helpful. Is there anything different about the Chinese production units, or could we take existing stock and bless them with different firmware?

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4

Yes, the Chinese production units have totally different keys, have firmware on a different server, need a different development account, etc.

There are no keys or backend shared between China and rest of world. We have to assume that all servers within China are compromised (by the government who are within their legal rights to do this in that territory), and we do not want this to affect the safety or security of devices elsewhere in the world.

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5

I assume the factory fixtures would need to be Chinese based as well? Or could a non-Chinese factory fixture bless a Chinese unit?

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6

They would need to be associated with the Chinese servers, yes. The imp005 fixtures can be swapped by loading new flash images (there’s an ISP header inside the box).

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7

Got it. Thank you Hugo, very helpful!

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