Configure Squid on a VPS to Watch Hulu, ABC, and Other Blocked Sites

Hulu VPSYou have yourself a VPS and you want to watch videos on Hulu, but Hulu has the videos blocked in your country. Hulu does this to save America the embarrassment of owning up to producing shows such as Dancing With the Stars, Hoarders, Ghost Hunters, and more. Those shows are made for American consumption only, but it is possible to sneak a peek into the American culture from overseas, and it involves setting up a proxy server with Squid.

We are going to assume that you have CentOS as your VPS’ operating system, root access, a text editor, and the newest version of Squid is 3. The syntax of Squid has changed from version 2 and has invalidated a lot of tutorials.

1) Install Squid

yum install squid

Robots say this when they visit delicious sushi restaurants.

2) Configure Squid
Open the Squid configuration file located at /etc/squid/squid.conf with a text editor and add the following lines to the top, replacing 123.123.123.123 with IP addresses that you wish to whitelist.

acl safe_list src 123.123.123.123
http_access allow safe_list
header_replace User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/534.48.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.48.3
via off
forwarded_for off
follow_x_forwarded_for deny all

2 optional) Change the Port Number to Something Easier to Remember
Find the line that reads “http_port 3128” and change it to something else.

http_port 8888

3) Restart the Squid Service

/sbin/service squid restart
firefox_proxy_window

My browser is written in moon-runes, but the layout is similar across every browser in every language.

4) Tell Your Browser to Use a Proxy
This is different depending on the browser, but will likely include tools->internet options->network->proxy
Enter the IP address of your VPS, along with the port number.

5) Check to See If Your Proxy is Detected
Go to www.whatismyip.com and hopefully you will see your VPS’ IP with a message that states “No Proxy Detected”
Next, open up releasegeo.hulu.com/geoCheck and check where Hulu thinks you are located. “valid false” means you are good, “no-valid false” means that the proxy didn’t work.

6) Watch Videos and Advertisements From Hulu Instead of Downloading Torrents of the Shows Without Advertisements
….yeah

7) You’re Done
…um, you’re done.

8) Congratulations
…You did it. Congratulations.

Disclaimer: Don’t do any of the aforementioned steps. Circumventing regional blocks is truly a horrible action on par with not putting the toilet seat down in a public restroom, or trying to use sarcasm on the internet without an accompanying emoticon.


3 thoughts on “Configure Squid on a VPS to Watch Hulu, ABC, and Other Blocked Sites

  1. I cannot answer with complete certainty, but I think that Hulu wouldn’t be blocking VPS company’s IP ranges, but rather individual IPs from VPSs that caused abuse in the past.
    A VPS is a great way to send out spam or cause problems, and a lot of the IP addresses for VPSs end up on blacklists.

    To answer your question, any VPS company should work fine, so long as the IP address is within the United States. After you set everything up and verify that your proxy is working properly, but still cannot connect to Hulu, ask for a refund.

    There are a lot of providers mentioned here: http://www.lowendtalk.com
    Do a lot of reading first, because a lot of them seem to be rather terrible.

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