So while on holidays, I got a bit bored and decided that I wanted to watch a bit of BBC iPlayer. However, unlike back at home, I was told that it was not possible due to me not being in the UK. However, there are always ways round restrictions such as these, especially when they are simple GEO-IP based restrictions ;)

To resolve this issue, I bought a low end VPS (thanks to lowendbox.com!), and found that QuickVPS.co.uk had what I was looking for: a 128MB ram, with 7GB HDD and 250 GB of bandwidth. After having bought this VPS server, I then started installing the Squid Cache proxy server. Do do so, I logged in to my CentOS 5.2 VPS server and entered these commands:

yum install squid

nano /etc/squid/squid.conf

Find:

http_port *select a port number*

And change:

http_access deny all

to:
http_access allow all

/etc/init.d/squid restart

After this, to prevent other people using up all my bandwidth, or for downloading illegal material which may get myself into trouble with the law, I set up a .htaccess password on the server. However, when trying to do the normal command I found that it was not installed on the server, so I was required to install httpd:

yum install httpd

Once this was done, I was then able to add my users:

htpasswd -c /etc/squid/passwd patrick

(note: only use -c for the first user)

Once this was done, I restarted the server and logged in with my username and password and iPlayer finally started working :D

Note: For some reason 4oD and Demand5 don’t work, so I’m guessing you’ll have to use SOCKS5 for it to work, or else a VPN. However, 4oD upload all their videos onto youtube and so videos seem to be streaming fine from there!