Dear all,

On a slightly quiet, can't be bothered to venture up a cold mountain two days in a row, sort of day I thought I'd get 'round to coaxing all the household electronics to "talk" the way I'd like them to... a foolish idea I fear!

Here is how my "simple" plan falls to ground in a nutshell:

We have an array of AV systems with which I would like to use my US and UK proxies. I wish them to default to the proxy via the house network or an independent wifi network without disrupting the existing LAN and WLAN networks.

None of the AV devices ( TVs, AV receivers, Blu Rays, Apple TV etc ) have any way of diverting their "browsing" to a proxy. Thus when you connect them content is clamped swiss side via cablecom CH.

I wish to avoid having a computer buzzing away diverting traffic via the proxies, so... are their any routers that one can simply enter the proxy details into and any machine that addresses or is connected to will "be in the UK or US"?

I was looking at a Cisco RV220W ( http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/rout...n_v1.0.1.0.pdf ) but can't see it's VPN functions will work in this scenario. I'm far from a networking expert... any ideas?

Cheers in advance,
David

Use a low powered net top running whatever OS to do your routing. Silent and small, Zotac's from Digitec have VESA mountings so you can hang hem off the back of the TV, either connect wirelessly or wire them in. Else get a 2nd router and root it to do bespoke routing...

Cheers man,

I was hoping there was sommmmme router out there that would be able to do this simple task by now it's not the size and noise but more the "it re boots and knows what the hell should be going on after a powercut" factor. I now it's not strictly a router task 'tho... Other problem is I want it to connect to all the AV over the floors not just localised, plus in an ideal world a simple wifi switch from one of the standard networks to the proxy one to log into BBC iPlayer on a given lappy at any time would be a plus...but I guess if a machine with an in / out and hang another network off the back is the only way

http://pfsense.org should be able to do this.
(I use it on a http://www.pcengines.ch/ board, but personally, I don't need to use an external proxy.)
Works very well. Ideally, you have a wireless access point that you can connect to one of its ethernet ports.
From various forum-posts, it seems you are looking for the "policy-routing" feature.

thanks!

I'll take a look

I'm not completely clear on what you are trying to do, but have a look at DD-WRT or OpenWRT. You can flash certain Linksys, Netgear, etc. routers with this Linux-based firmware and do all kinds of crazy things. You could, for example, separate your AV equipment from the rest of your network by assigning them to a different VLAN. As for connecting to a proxy, I'm not sure, but since it's Linux you could probably write your own script to do something like that.

OpenWRT: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start
DD-WRT: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

Continuing on esto's post... if you wanted to save yourself the hassle of flashing the routers, you could check out Sabai Technology who sell DD-WRT installed routers.

Flashing is extremley simple. Actually, if you can't handle that, you probably won't understand how to use DD-WRT's features and probably shouldn't get into it in the first place


**edit**

...but in the event one should be adverse to flashing, or just plain lazy, I would recommend this Buffalo router that comes pre-installed with DD-WRT. 90CHF for a Gigabit router and dual-band wifi is a good price in any case:

http://www.digitec.ch/?param=google&wert=170578

Thanks guys I was looking at DD-WRT flashing as it seems to do some cool stuff.

I do indeed want the AV on a separate network however having never seen the DD-WRT in detail I'm still unawares as to it's possibility to point to a web proxy... I need all traffic through that router to point to access.ukproxy.tv and or access.usproxy.tv with passwords stored in the router....?

WOW!! That is a good price, far cheeper than the Cisco AND it looks cool!!!

To separate via VLANs is easy with DD-WRT/OpenWRT as it's built right into the GUI. I'm pretty sure there's not any Proxy settings in the GUI, but I would imagine you could do someting via CLI. Or as it's Linux, you can compile your own.

If your DD-WRT has a USB socket, you can install Optware, which has a bunch of pre-compiled programs you can easily download and install. Have a look here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php...tware_packages

A quick search for "proxy" on that list turned up this, which you could look into:
connect - 1.96-1 - A simple relaying command to make network connection via SOCKS and https proxy.

Be ready to roll your sleeves up and get dirty tho, just because DD-WRT has GUI doesn't mean you'll be able to do whatever you want with a few clicks. In most cases, you need to go in CLI, make mistakes, and improve your learning curve before you get anything done



PS- The top router at the moment for DD-WRT is probably the ASUS RT-N16 (DD-WRT is not pre-installed, but it's pretty much built for it):
http://www.microspot.ch/microspot/pr..._Gi/detail.jsf

Overkill. It's very simple. As long as your device let's you set the DNS server(s) take a look at http://www.unblock-us.com. The major plus is you only need to point each of your devices, not your entire network, don't need more hardware, etc. I use it for Amazon Video which I get free with Prime membership. Works with hulu, netflix, etc.

I use it on my LG TV and Google TV Logitech Revue.

But this is a proxy surely? How do you enter the web address and password? NONE of my AV things will allow proxies....

As far as you're concerned it just works. Everything is handled on their side. This is my interpretation of how it works. Your device is making a request to some URL, it gets looked up on their DNS servers. If the URL is something like google.com it just gives you the regular IP to go to google.com. If it's netflix it gives you an IP of one of their US-based servers. It knows you're trying to go to netflix so it makes a connection to netflix on your behalf. It then passes traffic back and forth between you and nexflix which sees it as US-based traffic. Kind of like an old-fashioned switchboard.

Give it a try. It's free and here's the setup instructions http://www.unblock-us.com/how-to-set-up/. It really is ridiculously simple to use.

Been looking into this a bit more. Still a bit puzzled how unblock-us only works with certain sites. And it seems that you do not access IP addresses from various countries. With HideMyAss.com, I like the option of choosing the country IP.

In any case, will try unblock-us for a week and see where it goes.

fduvall

FYI there's another company called Unotelly.com that seems to do something similar. Cannot speak to the reliability, etc of their service vs. Unblock-us.

My impression of how this works, both companies, is that when you request certain URLs they step in the middle and make a US connection to your requested URL. I was playing with a new Blackberry Playbook and while the website thinks I'm in the US showing me US prices, the App World app knows I'm in Switzerland and shows me CHF prices and also blocks me from purchasing certain apps. I'm guessing that's a port issue. They probably handle these "port issues" for only certain things like Netflix, etc.

I bought a ddwrt capable router about a month ago, was able to flash it with the ddwrt firmware but was unable to figure out the VPN settings (I'm paying for a us VPN). Does anyone know who I can call/pay to come set it up for me? I know it's probobly simple but I tried this 6 months ago on a different router and bricked the router, and don't want to go through that again.