chichow

International Travel - OpenVPN for US IP address (HULU, TV streaming)

perhaps a silly question…

Issue: I'd like to access Hulu, TV streaming content while outside the USA

Proposed Solution: I'd like to setup a OpenVPN server at a friend's house. Friend's house because of higher upstream bandwidth.

Restraint: I can't do willy nilly to my friend's router. I can't just change it out to a DD-WRT device. I can have him put in a forwarding rules.

Question: Will putting an OpenVPN server like

WAN <--> Friend Router <--> OpenVPN server

allow me to come from the Internet (outside of USA), and then out to USA sites and bounce back to me even though my OpenVPN server is not on the edge of my friend's Internet connection?

additional background:

I am going to be traveling much more outside of the USA. I've moved away from a Tivo/Slingbox, so now I am much more reliant on strictly Internet contentn

In the past, I've spent a weekend setting up ssh tunnels and proxies for particular applications. Now, I'd rather just tunnel everything through a VPN.

Thanks!

BobbySteel

I'd guess that'd be pretty slow with the hops through a consumer-grade router. Why don't you buy a VPS and setup OpenVPN on that? You can find some cheap ones like VPSLink that are < $10 a month (albeit low grade). I use it on a Linode I also run a webserver on and it runs fine.

gfunkdave

It should still be fine...at least worth a try.

Here's a good walkthrough on how to set up an OpenVPN server in Debian using PAM authentication.

http://blog.sumostyle.net/robg/2010/02/25/ovpn-server/

Be sure you do the stuff at the top involving iptables and editing sysconf.

chichow

Why is it slow on the consumer grade routers? e.g. buffalo linksys, etc.

If the routers are just forwarding traffic and they are 4 port 100 Mbps switches on the LAN side, why can't they handle the 4-5 MBps up?

At the point that I am going to do a VPS, I'm just going to pay the $60 bucks a year for a VPN service...

tkflyer

Consumer grade should be fine, even it was handling the OpenVPN say via DD-WRT. eg: A LinkSys WRT54G maxes out at ~17MBps of routing and should give you ~3-8MBps of VPN bandwidth depending on protocol/encryption. You definitley get higher rates running your OpenVPN on an x86 box.

BobbySteel

How good is the line into your friend's house? You'll use 2x the bandwidth given you're going up and down.

In my experience, consumer grade routers get flaky when sucking down multiple Mbps of bandwidth up/down. Good luck to your friend while you're using their connection!

stueys

Why not just use a commercial grade service like witopia for instance? You'll get the same effect without having the hassle of arranging yourself, etc.

alect

There are also plenty of free US proxy servers available through which you can access Hulu (if that's your priority)

chichow

Some random thoughts:

I have spare Dell laptop (D4xx) that I was going to use at the OpenVPN server so I'm not worried about the load on the commercial grade router.

I probably should have been more specific about the travel. I'll likely be multiple time zones away from the USA (instead of say Latin America) so I'm not likely going to have bandwidth contention issues.

I'm going to be using Hulu, Netflix, various TV networks, etc. I'm concerned about some sites recognizing VPN provider IP blocks.

Thanks for all the responses.

BobbySteel

Technical issues aside, the services will function properly as far as geolocation goes. Good luck on the latency and bandwidth concerns. Probably will work but as always, who knows w/ residential broadband!

chichow

As a datapoint, when I used to just use Slingbox to view overseas content, it was good for sitcoms. Forget about it for sports. Its too fast moving.

At that point, if I had the jitters...I pretty much had to go to an Irish pub with a Satellite connection

PETEFLYS

A friend told me about this site he uses. I am not sure if this is what you are looking for and I have not used it yet. www.goldenfrog.com

nmenaker

I use hotspotvpn for this, just got back from india where it worked great. they have weekly, monthly and yearly plans, but they start at about 6$-10$ a month. no bandwidth caps. Strangely though, when I was in India, I didn't have to use the VPN all the time for access to itunes, netflix and some other services. But, with my slingbox I got MUCH better constant throughput with the VPN on.

smfnrt

What I do when I travel overseas and for my friends who live in Japan and Taiwan is to use my home computer as a "VPN router". Basically utilizing the PPTP VPN that is built into windows Vista / 7

I do have quite a bit of upload bandwidth (15Mbps) so Hulu, Netflix, Youtube (some videos) works great for my friends and I.

here's the Microsoft How-To link.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...-up-connection

southerndoc

I subscribe to OpenVPN through Reliable Hosting (strongvpn.com). Not terribly expensive (packages are $80-150/yr), and the speed is pretty fast.

Just a word of caution: If you use it for security purposes like I do, make sure you check the send all traffic through VPN setting in whichever you use (StrongVPN or OpenVPN). I think OpenVPN is a little harder to crack. The only reason I use it instead of StrongVPN is so I can get around my hospital's firewall to get my Facebooking on.