[OT] Roku/Netflix - naughty naughty

[Tim Watts]

Just got a Roku 3 internet media settop box as they were 20 quid off on Amazon.

It seems very smooth - except for one thing.

Either Roku or the Netflix app for it is hardcoding a secondary DNS of

8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS).

Primary DNS is still what DHCP tells it. Manual override not possible.

This breaks (randomly) using unblock-us.com to switch Netflix to the US catalogue.

I have just had to implement a rather nasty hack of assigning 8.8.8.8 to my local DNS server[1] and telling my ADSL router to static route

8.8.8.8 back to my DNS. Yech!

Rumour has it merely blocking 8.8.8.8 at the router would be enough. Not tried yet.

Heard another rumour that Chromecast does this too. I'll find out tomorrow - I bought one of those too...

[1] My DNS has variable forwarders - for certain client IPs it will use unblock-us's DNSs and for all else it will use my ISP's. Works rather well.

Anyone come across this?

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Tim Watts writes

Don't understand any of the above but Google (UK) commonly connects to the *world* version:-(

>

[Tim Watts]

This is media players (one of which happens to be made by Google).

Hardcoding a DNS server IP into something is very very sucky - be fun if I went all IPv6 and turned off IPv4!

Anyway - just playing. The Roku in other respects seems a very good player.

Chromecast is less so - bit crashy. Doesn't crash as such, but switching videos in Youtube seems to confuse the app most of the time needing a disconnect/reconnect to the Chromecast dongle.

Just disabling the Google IP hack to see if that makes any difference (doubt it).

[Tim Watts]

Ah - best solution...

Tell my DHCP server that my DNS linux server is the router *just for roku and chromecast".

Add these 2 rules to DNS server's iptables config:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.8.8/32 -j DNAT --to-destination

10.0.0.14 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d 8.8.4.4/32 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.0.14

(10.0.0.14 is the servers own address).

And make sure ip forwarding (routing) is enabled. Voila. chromecast completely stable now and roku happy.

Much nicer solution as the "buggeration" is cleaner and only applies to the devices that need it.

[Brian Gaff]

After all Google loves to see what the world is actually doing on line. Brian

[Tim Watts]

But i suspect this is connected with the MPAA dinosaurs whining about protecting their antiquated concept of regions...