Accessing Hulu Outside The US

In this case, we’ll be using a small VM and the open source VPN server pptpd. All the server side instructions below are applicable to both OS X and Windows, but the client setup is only specified for Mac OS X.

Server Setup

First, obtain a VM from a reputable (and fast) US vendor. The VM must be located in the US since that’s our required origin. I personally use Slicehost, but there are many others. Once you get your login be sure you change the root password.

Install pptpd. If you’re running on Ubuntu or Debian you can simply run

apt-get install pptpd

Once you have pptpd installed, we’ll need to add a user. The default pptpd configuration is fine, but we’ll need to edit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets. When you edit the file (using vi, nano, emacs, et cetera) you’ll see this:

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client        server  secret                  IP addresses

Client is your username, server is “pptpd”, secret is your password in plaintext, and IP addresses is a range of allowed IPs. If you’re unconcerned about who might attempt to access your VPN, you can simply use a wildcard (*). Once you’ve populated this file with data it will look something like this:

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client	server	secret			IP addresses
testuser	pptpd	mypassword		*

We need to set up IPv4 forwarding, so edit /etc/sysctl.conf and uncomment the line below from the file (remove the #).

#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

This will enable the behavior after a reboot, but you can enable it right now by running:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Now run these commands:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

Once you’ve run these you can save them so they execute every time your VM boots by following these quick instructions. This completes the server side setup.

Client Setup

Now it’s time to configure the Mac to utilize the VPN server. Bear in mind that all traffic to the internet will be routed through your VPN server when this is active, so you’ll only want to connect to your VPN when watching Hulu.²

Open System Preferences and go to Network.  Click the plus sign in the lower left and choose add to add a VPN PPTP interface.  Then set the server address (the IP of your VM) and account name (“testuser” from above).

After filling out those fields, click authentication settings and type your password, then click Okay.

Finally, click advanced, then click DNS and click the plus sign.  Add 4.2.2.1 as a DNS server.³

Save these changes and then you can click connect to test it out. Your traffic should all be routed through the VPN and since the endpoint is located in the US Hulu should work just fine!

In the ideal case everything is the same as a regular vhost, but you’ll first need to enable SSL. On Ubuntu this requires you to run a2enmod and type “ssl”. After that you’ll need to add

NameVirtualHost *:443

to the root conf, then make your VirtualHost much like a normal one. A very basic pair of vhosts is seen below.

<VirtualHost *:443>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 
	DocumentRoot /my/doc/root
	ServerName mydomain.com
	SSLEngine On
	SSLCertificateFile /path/to/domain.crt 
	SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/domain.key
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 
	DocumentRoot /my/doc/root
	ServerName mydomain2.com
	SSLEngine On
	SSLCertificateFile /path/to/domain2.crt 
	SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/domain2.key
</VirtualHost>

These vhosts should be placed in different includes ideally, but it isn’t required. If you just want to test with a self-signed certificate you can create one with

openssl req -new -nodes -keyout mykey.key -out mycert.cer -days 3650 -x509

You’ll need to specify the domain name you want in the “Common Name” section.

Once you’ve got all this done you can restart apache and test it out! If you test on a browser that doesn’t support SNI (IE on XP) you’ll get the SSL cert for the first vhost apache parses. To disable accessing it on non-SNI hosts you can add

SSLStrictSNIVHostCheck on

to the root conf. This will cause a 403 error for those browsers.

If you’d like to see an example implementation of SNI you can check out my IDN domains https://☢.ws/ and https://☣.ws/. These sites are hosted on the same IP with different SSL certificates. I have strict host checking turned on so visiting them with a non-SNI capable browser will result in a 403 error.¹

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

Follow the instructions, reboot, and you’re done!

Update: If you’re using VMware Fusion 3.0 or any VMware Tools version 8.2.3-204229 or better you can follow a drastically simplified process. sudo apt-get install build-essential, choose install VMware Tools from the menu, copy tar to desktop, untar, sudo ./vmware-install.pl and follow the instructions. Simple!

With the release of the Ubuntu 9.10 RC it’s time to revisit installing Ubuntu into a VMware VM. I’m using VMware Fusion 2.0.x, but behavior should be largely the same for any recent VMware release.

First, create a new VM and point the installation disk at your Ubuntu 9.10 ISO. At this time I would not recommend using “easy install”, so uncheck that and continue. If you wish to use the graphical installer you’ll need to increase the RAM allocated to your VM from 512MB to 768MB.¹

Now you can boot your VM and follow the graphical installer. Once complete your VM will hopefully reboot properly and ask you if you want to force the CD to disconnect (you do). If this doesn’t occur, force the guest to shut down, disconnect the ISO in the settings, then boot the VM again.

The official VMware Tools do not work properly due to the newer kernel (2.6.31), so we’ll need to build the open-vm-tools for this kernel. Follow the steps below to build them yourself or simply download the AMD64 deb package I have already built for the modules.²

1. Obtain the build prerequisities³

   sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools build-essential open-vm-toolbox

2. Run module assistant to build the modules

   sudo m-a

3. Choose select and activate open-vm
   
4. Click okay, then select build
   
   
5. Once it completes it will ask if you want to install. Choose yes, then quit out of m-a and reboot.
6. After a reboot check to see that the vm modules inserted into the kernel properly.

   vmware@vmware-desktop:~$ lsmod | grep vm
   vmsync                  5104  0 
   vmmemctl               10120  0 
   vmhgfs                 59080  0 
   vmci                   33952  0

If you see the 4 modules listed above then you should have functioning copy/paste, auto-resolution switching, and even shared folders. However, to enable shared folders you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Enable shared folders and add a folder in the VM settings⁴
2. Run this command:⁵

   sudo mount -t vmhgfs -v -o ro .host:/sharedfoldername /path/to/mnt

Let me know in the comments if you have issues or have improvements to the process. Waiting for the official VMware Tools release is boring!

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade
aptitude install update-manager-core

This will get your system upgraded to the latest packages of 8.10 and install the scripts to move to Jaunty. Be sure you have screen installed as well — Ubuntu does not like having upgrades interrupted so you want to be able to resume if your session is interrupted for any reason.

screen do-release-upgrade

It will download and check a few things and then warn you about operating an upgrade over ssh (along with starting an extra ssh daemon on port 9004). Simply follow the instructions from there and you’ll have a fully upgraded server!¹

cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jaunty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.04"

Update 4/25/09 Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) final was released a few days ago so I grabbed it and rebuilt my VM. I don’t recommend using the “easy install” option at this time, so uncheck that and run through the Ubuntu installer by hand. There are only 7 steps and you can leave everything default if you want. Once installed you can follow the instructions below (including the vmmouse install) to get it all up and running.

Update 4/21/09: RC is now out and to get mouse ungrab working you can simply run this command:

aptitude install xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

Be sure to aptitude update to get the latest package lists. I’ll do a new post when Ubuntu 9.04 is released in a few days. Be sure to check the comments of this post for other takes on getting this working properly!

Now that Ubuntu 9.04 has gone into beta I decided to build up a quick VM for random testing purposes.  Installation is very straightforward: simply download the x86 or AMD64 CD image and install. However, since this is a beta things are in heavy flux — I would highly recommend upgrading to the latest packages before installing the VMware Tools since several bugs (like the infinitely multiplying window when mounting the VMWare Tools image) have been fixed.

Select “Install VMware Tools” from the Virtual Machine menu and then copy the tar to your Ubuntu desktop.  Running the vmware-install.pl as superuser will net you a mostly functional system, but drag/drop files and mouse ungrab will not work.¹

To get VMHGFS working (drag/drop file sharing), you will need to follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source and untar vmhgfs.tar.  Inside the vmhgfs-only directory that is created there is a file called page.c.
2. Edit this file and do the following²

   -    page = __grab_cache_page(mapping, index);
   +    page = grab_cache_page_write_begin(mapping, index, flags);

3. Move the vmhgfs.tar file to vmhgfs-old.tar and create a new tar with the modified file

   tar cvf vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs-only

4. Run the vmware-install.pl script (as superuser)

At this time I haven’t managed to get mouse ungrab working, but let me know if you figure out a way! The vmmouse driver for X.org is available via apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse, but does not appear to work any better than the one that comes with VMware Tools 7.9.3. Hopefully a driver compatible with X.org 7.5 shows up soon.