Unsolved Best approach for country VPN for multiple devices
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@Ambarishrh said:
I've been using PIA https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ for almost 2 years now and pretty happy with it. Its cheap and can connect up to 5 devices at the same time with one account. Works well with my Android phone, ipad, MAC and Windows. Use it for Netflix streaming connecting to US as Netflix is not available yet in the middle east
Does it work with the Kindle Fire TV is the big question. Almost nothing does.
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This sounds like you would need a different device, or a VPN gateway on a laptop or something that network devices can communicate through. Do you bring a router with you or was that one of the things you leave behind?
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@JaredBusch said:
It works quite well, @scottalanmiller's opinion to the contrary.
Define "works quite well." From what I've seen it does not work at all - but we may have different definition of "works."
I say that it does not work well because:
- Mistakes are common resulting in lost or annoyed customers. (Blocking legit customers.)
- It presents opportunity for assumption (you go to a site you want and get redirected to one you do not.)
- Location does not imply what people tend to think that it implies (where your customer is now does not imply where they live or work or the location of the business itself.)
- It is trivial, to the point of being transparent for non-technical users, to intentionally bypass and mislead.
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If by "works well" you simply mean that "most of the time it guesses the right country", then sure. But I would not at all consider that working well. That's similar to the "block all" approach of firewalls, yes the average packet coming in in malicious so if you block absolutely everything you block more malicious than non-malicioius. So by a purely statistical approach if sounds like it is good. But it also means you blocked the purpose of the service.
Obviously an extreme example, but the question around "working well" becomes - what is the goal with it? If it is to block malicious users it might work well if we are meaning only casual ones. If it is to determine where someone is to change services, it is trivial to modify that. What's the use case where it significantly does what people believe it will do or they intend for it to do?
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You could use AWS-EC2 free-tier linux instance to build an OpenVPN server and encapsulate the traffic in SSL. This is kinda shady, and depending on your locale could be considered less than legal, but it works.
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@coliver said:
This sounds like you would need a different device, or a VPN gateway on a laptop or something that network devices can communicate through. Do you bring a router with you or was that one of the things you leave behind?
If you can provide your own gateway device to your Amazon device you could be able to VPN to wherever you like from the gateway appliance.
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@RamblingBiped said:
You could use AWS-EC2 free-tier linux instance to build an OpenVPN server and encapsulate the traffic in SSL. This is kinda shady, and depending on your locale could be considered less than legal, but it works.
No different than for ANY modification of source IP address.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Does it work with the Kindle Fire TV is the big question. Almost nothing does.
Not sure how Kindle fire network connectivity is. When i had a Roku3, which didn't have a VPN option on its networking, what i did was to use the L2TP/IPSec setup of PIA on my iMAC, used that VPN for Internet Sharing from MAC to Roku3. -
Once we do this move we will have a computer there that will be available for this but ideally we do not want to be running a high performance, big power draw PC all day long. Part of the point of the Fire TV is that it is a low power device for doing simple things like watching YouTube.
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Tried any DNS services like https://www2.unotelly.com/home
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@Ambarishrh said:
Tried any DNS services like https://www2.unotelly.com/home
Fire TV locks DNS, does it not?
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Setting up our own VPN is not ideal, because equipment will then have to be kept somewhere out there, and we don't have a home base.
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@Dominica That is the nice thing about using an AWS-EC2 instances. You can have pre-built/configured VPN servers in different locales (US East-Virginia, EU-Ireland, Asia Pacific-Singapore, South America-Sao Paolo) and bring up/take down an instance as you travel to different parts of the world. The last time we had people travel to Asia I spun up an EC2 instance in Singapore and they were able to connect to email and other services with little to no latency.
Traveling to Europe? Take down the Singapore instance and bring up an instance in Ireland.
Their free-tier is good for a year of use if I remember correctly, and should be more than enough oomph for personal use.
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No free for us, we used up the free tier long ago.
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It is only getting access to the US that we are looking for.
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@Dominica Hosted solves that.
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Why would you need a power hungry PC for this? Couldn't you use something like an ERL? If you wired access, you could plug the ERL into the internet, and hang a UAP off the other side (the 5 port ERL has POE) and you should be good.
If you only have wireless access, you'd need two UAPs, one for connection to your provider, and one to your stuff, assuming you couldn't get a VLAN situation working, then you might be able to do it all with one.
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Please check this, http://help.unotelly.com/support/solutions/articles/193478-setting-up-unodns-on-your-amazon-fire-tv-
and probably as trial, try the DNS entries:
Primary DNS: 5.100.250.54Secondary DNS: 103.250.184.116
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Looks promising, checking that one out.
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So it appears that this will work for the Fire TV but there is one little catch - there is no advanced option when your WiFi doesn't use a password - which the one that we are on here in Galveston does not. So I am attempting to test this and the setting that I need to enter doesn't exist for us
