Humax streaming / catch up services blocked by VPN

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Humax streaming / catch up services blocked by VPN

(100 posts)

Pollensa1946

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rjsdavis - 1 hour ago » ......You weren't contributing anything to solving the problem anyway - merely critiquing why a VPN would be used in the "private environment"...

Well, in the background I was following up with some people (my son included) who are very experienced in networks, but that's abandoned. I hope you find what your looking for.

| Mon 20 Jan 2020 21:23:52 #51 |
rjsdavis

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Pollensa1946 - 1 hour ago »

rjsdavis - 1 hour ago » ......You weren't contributing anything to solving the problem anyway - merely critiquing why a VPN would be used in the "private environment"...

Well, in the background I was following up with some people (my son included) who are very experienced in networks, but that's abandoned. I hope you find what your looking for.

Pollensa1946 - 12 hours ago »
The inability to access iPlayer via a VPN has been ongoing for a number of years. This applies not only to Humax but also to other boxes and TVs. As I said in an earlier post, some very smart people have failed to solve this.

Ok, I'll try to deal with the loss of you perpetually posting about what extensive skills/experience you and your friends/relations have.

| Mon 20 Jan 2020 22:43:55 #52 |
Trev

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Stop being so bloody rude.

| Mon 20 Jan 2020 23:14:31 #53 |
rjsdavis

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GrahamRHK - 7 hours ago »
I wonder - just wonder whether you can use firewall rules to bypass the VPN. I have just looked at my Draytek 2862 and the knowledge base and that might just be possible. To force a specific ip address to have direct access to the WAN rather than the VPN. If I'm talking rubbish please feel free to ignore!!!!

Hi Graham

I've just had an interesting response from Nord:

"As for the BBC iPlayer and other UK services, our service is used to bypass their geo-restrictions in different parts of the world, therefore resulting in our servers being blocked.

Unfortunately, its availability on various Android box/TV/Firestick devices is restricted, with the only workaround being accessing content via browser directly.

Please note that due to multiple factors, NordVPN cannot guarantee 24/7 availability for all geo-restricted content. However, I can assure you that our techs are constantly working to provide secure access to as many services as possible."

It appears to me, that bypassing the VPN using an internal route policy will be the only solution here!

| Tue 21 Jan 2020 0:15:47 #54 |
GrahamRHK

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It appears to me, that bypassing the VPN using an internal route policy will be the only solution here!

I know this is dealing with a different scenario but it just might help you https://www.draytek.com/support/knowledge-base/5750. That is if you haven't been here already... here you are using the firewall to determine routing rather than set route policies. I don't use a VPN so can't test it. Nor have I done much with the firewall except tweak existing settings but you might just be able to set a rule to allow the FVP to go direct to the internet (WAN) rather than the VPN.

| Tue 21 Jan 2020 7:58:36 #55 |
SSThing

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Is it possible to disconnect all other devices temporarily, run iPlayer on the Humax and capture a log file of the ip addresses etc that it is attempting to connect to, and then specifically exclude those ones from the VPN?

| Tue 21 Jan 2020 12:30:35 #56 |
GrahamRHK

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Is it possible to disconnect all other devices temporarily, run iPlayer on the Humax and capture a log file of the ip addresses etc that it is attempting to connect to, and then specifically exclude those ones from the VPN?

That is what I did when posting the endpoints in the post earlier. Wireshark set to capture only from the Humax, display filter set to eliminate any internal traffic to/from the HUMAX; then use the statistics "endpoints" function to display those. I think there are too many to make this suggestion practical - and anyway, load balancing on, say, bbc servers means that the endpoint ip addresses will change over time (I suspect - may be wrong).
I made the suggestion about using the firewall rules to allow Humax traffic to bypass the VPN having read specific advice about that for pfsense routers. It must be possible, I would have thought, to do the same with a Draytek router - but I admit that the admin interface is a bit convoluted and hard to understand.
Having thought about this intriguing problem a bit more I found this https://www.draytek.com/support/knowledge-base/5013 which you may have seen before... Perhaps Route Policy is the way to do it. But check the NAT settings to ensure that received traffic gets back to the Humax. It ought to work - given my understanding of how NAT works i.e. the remote end sees the WAN ip address and port number and the router knows that traffic from that remote end must follow the return path specified by the initiator of the conversation (Humax).

| Tue 21 Jan 2020 17:11:13 #57 |
SSThing

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As you can disable the VPN and the Humax iPlayer works, can you re-enable the VPN while the iPlayer is playing a programme? What happens, does it continue or does it lose connection?

| Wed 22 Jan 2020 15:42:35 #58 |
Martin Liddle

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GrahamRHK - 1 day ago »
I think there are too many to make this suggestion practical

Why? All the BBC IP addresses I found were in a contiguous range '212.58.224.0 - 212.58.255.255'.

| Wed 22 Jan 2020 18:53:45 #59 |
GrahamRHK

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Why? All the BBC IP addresses I found were in a contiguous range '212.58.224.0 - 212.58.255.255'.

That is quite correct - however, the sample I posted showed that the FVP goes to many other places too. This was while iPlayer was started, watched for a few minutes then stopped. I have no idea why this is but my guess would be that if any of these are blocked, for whatever reason, then internet based services may not work properly.
Hence my suggestion - having studied the Draytek manual, the Draytek Knowledge Base and the config options on my Draytek 2862 - that Route Policy will do exactly what rjsdavis needs to do. (I hope!!!)

| Thu 23 Jan 2020 7:57:27 #60 |