« New Creations

A Mini-Hackster I Am

30 June 2009 | 5 Comments

WARNING: Geek post ahead!

So, for ages I was annoyed at policies practised by media-related web sites in the US to restrict streaming traffic strictly to IP addresses originating from North America. So poor old Malaysian-bound Rudi had no way of accessing wonderful music, say, on Pandora.

Of course, I investigated options on circumventing this block. Unfortunately, most of them were pretty unreliable or worse, unusably slow.

I eventually forgot about this and just resigned myself to the vagaries of international licensing and royalty legislation.

But recently I took out a VPS in California to host my clients’ sites. I did this for the added reliability, resources and speed, but a nifty side effect of this (expensive) upgrade are a couple of dedicated IP addresses. It suddenly occurred to me that… uh-huh.

Short version of the story: SSH Socks Telnet tunelling into my Linux VPS lets me surf completely undetectable on websites as if I was calling from California. Which means Pandora, Hulu etc are now accessible! And the best part is? It’s just about almost as fast as a native direct connection. And because I, in effect, own the connection, it’s utterly reliable and private.

Gotta love it! And my dad will probably love it as well if the iTunes store practices IP-based restrictions, as he claims it does.

Next step: set up a dedicated VPN service on the box with filtering to allow only HTTP traffic through to my static IP address here at home. Learnin’ Linux! About time, really.

5 Comments

  1. Sharim said on 30 Jun 2009 at 4:24 am:

    Don’t suppose you could open up that connection to a few old friends of yours hankering for some Hulu action? ;)

  2. Rudi said on 30 Jun 2009 at 4:42 am:

    Managed to get Squid installed, so access can now be public rather than by SSH, which is very finicky and requires my root pw.

    But Hulu doesn’t work, because apparently the Flash protocol they use bypasses any proxy settings. Not that I use Hulu, but I reckon it’s a challenge nontheless!

    I’ve read that a full-blown VPN would get around this, so game on. If I get it working, you’ll be the first to get privileged access. I think I have 900GB bandwidth on that plan, so you can Hulu away.

  3. Lok said on 30 Jul 2009 at 2:47 pm:

    In English, please? :P

  4. QShel said on 31 Jul 2009 at 9:24 pm:

    The geek shall inherit the earth

    Oops, i mean meek.

    ;)

  5. Aaron said on 21 Oct 2009 at 10:08 am:

    using linux eh? which version/build?
    looks like your server is super cool, LAMP based? specs? (if you don’t mind, thanks in advance)

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