Using a VPN to watch ITV content outside the UK

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Those who follow me on Twitter (@markwilsonit) will probably be aware that I recently spent some time in mainland Europe – travelling through France, Germany and Switzerland with my family. You’ll probably also be aware that one of my hobbies is road cycling – and that I like to watch the highlights from the three Grand Tours (Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España) and from the Tour of Britain. With the Vuelta in full swing as my holiday started, I wanted to make sure I could still catch the highlights on ITV4!

Even with the new EU mobile roaming arrangements that mean I can use my mobile data allowance in other EU countries, I didn’t expect to be able to stream content reliably, so I took out a subscription to ITV Hub+, allowing me to download ITV programmes with the ITV Hub app (on Wi-Fi) and play back later, without ads. This worked brilliantly on the ferry to France but not so well once I was in my Paris hotel room, where the app detected I was outside the UK and denied access to content with a variety of error messages:

ITV Hub download error outside the UK ITV Hub download error outside the UK ITV Hub download error outside the UK

I was pretty annoyed – after all, there was no mention of UK-only coverage when I subscribed to the ITV Hub+ and the ITV website says:

“Where can I use a Hub+ subscription?

As long as you’re signed into your account, you’ll be able to use your Hub+ subscription almost anywhere. Watch ad-free telly on our website, download and catch up on the go on your mobile or tablet, or binge on your favourite shows with no interruptions on your Smart TV!”

but I did find the limitation in their troubleshooting guide later:

“I am abroad and can’t watch videos
The ITV Hub is only available within the UK as we don’t hold international rights for all of our shows. If you’re lucky enough to be on holiday or you live abroad, you won’t be able to watch ITV Hub until you return to the UK”

After a bit of a rant on Twitter (no response from ITV, of course), I thought about using a VPN (and @JFDuncan suggested Plex).

Unfortunately, my own VPN back to my NAS didn’t work (on reflection, L2TP/IPSec was not the best choice of transport – as @GarryMartin pointed out when I originally set it up) and I was nervous about using a third party service until Justin Barker (@JustinBarker77) suggested TunnelBear:

Recommendations are always good. And TunnelBear seemed more legitimate than some of the sites I found…

At first, I didn’t have much luck – even after following TunnelBear’s troubleshooting advice for accessing content. 24 hours later though, something had cleared (maybe I had a different IP address, maybe it was something on my iPhone) and ITV Hub+ worked flawlessly over hotel Wi-Fi and a VPN back to the UK. I could download my cycling highlights for later playback and the VPN tunnel even seemed to improve the Holiday Inn Wi-Fi reliability – possibly due to QoS restrictions prioritising potential business traffic (VPN) over leisure (downloading videos)!

I did have some challenges with playback – so I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode before watching content, just in case the ITV Hub app detected I was outside the UK again, but each time I wanted to download over the next few days I enabled the VPN and all was good. I also subscribed to TunnelBear for a month’s worth of unlimited data allowance (I soon chewed through the 1GB I got for tweeting about the service!).

Hopefully, this information will help someone else who’s frustrated by paying for a download service and then finding it doesn’t work outside the UK…

VPN, DirectAccess or Windows 10 auto-trigger VPN profile?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

On a recent consulting gig, I found myself advising a customer who was keen to deploy Microsoft DirectAccess (DA) in place of their legacy virtual private network (VPN) solution. As a DirectAccess user (who used Cisco AnyConnect VPN at my last place of work), I have to say the convenience of being always connected to the company network without any interaction on my part is awesome. I’m sure the IT guys like that they can always access my PC for management purposes too…

The trouble with DirectAccess is that it doesn’t seem to have a published roadmap. So, should I really be advising my customers to use a technology that doesn’t seem to be being developed? First of all, I should add that it’s not been deprecated. DirectAccess is still a supported feature in Windows Server 2016 (it’s part of the Remote Access server role) – so it’s still got a future. Annoyingly, it’s not a supported workload on Azure (leading to on-premises deployments) but we can’t have everything…

Now for the question of whether to use DA or a traditional VPN. Well, Microsoft MVP Richard Hicks (@RichardHicks) has written a fantastic blog post that goes through this in detail. Rather than paraphrasing, I’ll suggest that you go and read Richard’s post on DirectAccess vs. VPN.

But that’s not the whole picture… you see Windows 10 has a new auto-triggered VPN profile capability that I’m sure will, in time, replace DirectAccess. So, where does that fit in?

Great response there from Richard, and then my colleague Steve Harwood (@steveeh) joined in, advising that Auto VPN still requires a VPN profile and infrastructure but gets initiated through either a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) or desktop app being started or stopped, meanwhile DirectAccess has other benefits from being always-on avoiding the need to expose management/compliance systems publicly.

Actually, it gets a bit better with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (RedStone 1/1607), which has the Always On VPN profile option, but we’re still Windows-only at this point. Richard has recommended a DirectAccess alternative for Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android:

So if the question is “should you deploy DirectAccess?”, the answer is “maybe”. It’s a Windows Enterprise-only solution but, if you have other clients in your enterprise, you might want to consider alternatives instead of or alongside DA.

Short takes: calculating file transfer times; Internet breakout from cloud datacentres; and creating a VPN with a Synology NAS

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another collection of “not-quite-whole-blog-posts”…

File transfer time calculations

There are many bandwidth/file transfer time calculators out there on the ‘net but I found this one particularly easy to work with when trying to assess the likely time to sync some data recently…

Internet breakout from IaaS

Anyone thinking of using an Azure IaaS environment for Internet breakout (actually not such a bad idea if you have no on-site presence, though be ready to pay for egress data) just be aware that because the IP address is in Holland (or Ireland, or wherever) location-aware websites will present themselves accordingly.

One of my customers was recently caught out when Google defaulted to Dutch after they moved their client Internet traffic over to Azure in the West Europe region… just one to remember to flag up in design discussions.

Creating a VPN with a Synology NAS

I’ve been getting increasingly worried about the data I have on a plethora of USB hard disks of varying capacities and wanted to put it in one place, then sync/archive as appropriate to the cloud. To try and overcome this, I bought a NAS (and there are only really two vendors to consider – QNAP or Synology).  The nice thing is that my Synology DS916+ NAS can also operate many of the network services I currently run on my Raspberry Pi and a few I’ve never got around to setting up – like a VPN endpoint for access to my home network.

So, last night, I finally set up a VPN, following Scott Hanselman’s (@shanselman) article on Setting up a VPN and Remote Desktop back into your home. Scott’s article includes client advice for iPhone and Windows 8.1 (which also worked for me on Windows 10) and the whole process only took a few minutes.

The only point where I needed to differ from Scott’s article was the router configuration (the article is based on a Linksys router and I have a PlusNet Hub One, which I believe is a rebadged BT Home Hub). L2TP is not a pre-defined application to allow access, so I needed to create a new application (I called it L2TP) with UDP ports 500, 1701 and 4500 before I could allow access to my NAS on these ports.

Creating an L2TP application in the PlusNet Hub One router firewall

Port forwarding to L2TP in the PlusNet Hub One router firewall