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Comment by OmarIsmail | Hacker News Reader

Sign up for www.unblock-us.com or www.unotelly.com and watch the amazing BBC coverage on iPlayer. Super super simple setup.

Personally, I prefer www.unblock-us.com

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Proxies like unotelly may send more of your traffic through their service than you would like. You can protect your traffic but still use the tunnel if you only send bbc.co.uk DNS lookups to unotelly.

Here's how to do this in Ubuntu 12.04. The DNS has changed in 12.04 to use NetworkManager, which makes the process more convoluted than it should be. The below instructions could be improved but it'll get you some BBC Olympics coverage.

# https://gist.github.com/3202101

Ubuntu 12.04

$ nslookup bbc.co.uk # you should see a UK IP e.g. 212.58.241.131

$ vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf # comment out dnsmasq #dns=dnsmasq

# save+quit

$ vi /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

$ service network-manager restart

# create a new dnsmasq.conf with unotelly California DNS 184.169.139.227 206.214.214.28 # note that server=192.168.11.1 is my router (which handles my upstream DNS) and you'll need to change that IP. $ vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf

server=/bbc.co.uk/206.214.214.28212.58.241.131 server=/co.uk/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-a.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-b.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-c.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-d.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-e.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbc.co.uk.edgesuite.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbcfmhds.vo.llnwd.net/206.214.214.28 server=192.168.11.1

# save+quit

$ nohup /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127.0.0.1 --conf-file=/etc/dnsmasq.conf --cache-size=0 --proxy-dnssec &

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

$ nslookup bbc.co.uk # you should see unotelly proxy servers e.g. uk-cluster.unostructure.com

Just use http://tunlr.net/ 's DNS servers instead - it's the same type of service, just completely free and with no signup required.

Primary DNS: 64.250.122.104 Secondary DNS: 199.167.30.144

is tunlr using PAC files and WPAP?

how did you use this to watch iPlayer? It seems like it is for giving a US based DNS for people outside the US.

The DNS resolves supported websites to their hosts, which proxy through the US. (n.b, not verified but that's a sane implementation of this)

Not sure why others downvoted you. I just tried unblock-us.com and it works... basically by changing your DNS servers. I added it to the article as another option.

I'm confused because I thought that geo-restrictions were handled by IP address, so I'm not sure how this gets around that.

It's still based on proxy servers, but their DNS server returns the address of their proxy server instead of the real IP address.

As with any DNS provider they can presumably spoof any site they wish too; so I'd be pretty cautious about using them for all DNS calls.

On Mac OS X, you can use them just for specific domains. For example, create:

  /etc/resolver/bbc.co.uk

with the contents:

  nameserver 208.122.23.22
  nameserver 208.122.23.23

And now you'll be using unblock-us's name servers for just bbc.co.uk and its subdomains. You could do something similar for your entire network with dnsmasq.

Nice feature.

Unfortunately, this tip doesn't seem to be working for the Olympics replays on the BBC's site (they all have a "try again later" every time I try to watch one).

Thanks for the tip, though, and kudos to Unblock-Us for being one of a VERY few sites that let you trial their service without giving them payment details.

It appears some items are being served from player.bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net -- but even when I redirect that to unblock's DNS servers I still can't watch those videos.

edit: using unotelly.com's DNS for co.uk and bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net works for me.

Does anyone know how to do this on a router running dd-wrt with dnsmasq?

Have not reset to test that it rewrites the change, but enter the below in the Additional DNSMasq box of services tab, and it should work as intended.

server=/bbc.co.uk/###.###.###.###,

ip would be for the alternate nameserver

Our VPN at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com also has multiple gigabits of bandwidth available through our two UK gateways. We have an app that provides one click setup on both windows and osx.

How does this work?

Looks like some sort of proxy. Routing through the UK is an option so BBC iPlayer will allow you to stream the Olympics.

Are you saying technically under the hood, or just how does a person use the service?

Using the service is trivial for anybody on HN. Just a matter of setting your DNS settings to specific servers. That's it.

Technically... I'm still trying to figure that one out. I think what they do is handle the IP check from the service, and then pass off the stream to your computer. This would make sense since the stream server would be different than the IP check server. This is great because then only a very limited subset of traffic is flowing through their servers so you get "native" speeds.

You've got the right idea. I ended up implementing my own proxy for Netflix as you describe. I use dnsmasq to hijack the relevant DNS requests and then I wrote my own https proxy to proxy the API connections. The actual streams come from CDNs of which are not concerned about your country of origin.

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