Squid, Azure and beating youtube's regional filter

Every so often I try to watch videos on YouTube that are not available for my region/country (UK) and normally I can easily find an alternative that is available for the UK but last week I thought, why not just use a proxy?.

I have an MSDN subscription, which among other things, gives me £100 of Azure credit a month, so I thought I'd use some of the credit for this.

I provisioned a A0 OpenLogic 7.0 box and I got started. If you're wondering the cost for a linux A0 instance is £0.0011/hr ~ £8 a month and bandwidth is £0.08 per GB (first 5GB are free).

1. Install Squid

sudo yum -y install squid


2. Add allowed IP addresses

sudo vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

# Example rule allowing access from your local networks.
# Adapt to list your (internal) IP networks from where browsing
# should be allowed
acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8     # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12  # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src fc00::/7       # RFC 4193 local private network range
acl localnet src fe80::/10      # RFC 4291 link-local (directly plugged) machine  s

acl work src  111.111.111.0/24
acl home src  111.111.111.111

# INSERT YOUR OWN RULE(S) HERE TO ALLOW ACCESS FROM YOUR CLIENTS

http_access allow work
http_access allow home


3. Enable IP Forwarding by editing sysctl.conf file.

sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf
Add the following to file: net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf


4. Enable and start Squid

systemctl enable squid
systemctl start squid

Now we need to open the firewall in Azure for the box, Squid listens, by default on port 3128 and configure your browser to use this proxy ... Bye, Bye dreaded: The uploader has not made this video available in your country.

It's worth pointing out that this doesn't work for all websites, see my post about a setting up a VPN server on AWS if you want to a VPN server. Azure doesn't support GRE protocol 47, so it's SSL VPNs only on Azure.