My ISP, Free, is in a bit of a conflict with Google, on a number of subjects. Advertising, bandwidth prices, the list is fairly long. If this were a purely commercial war, end-users wouldn’t be hit. But, neither Google nor Free wanting to back down, it stopped being a purely commercial war, and for the past year or so, the pipe connecting Free users to YouTube’s servers has shrunk to become tiny.

I don’t mind, I think Free is an excellent ISP, and even though I could switch to another ISP and bypass these issues, their stance on protecting my rights and privacy is unequalled. I value my privacy and their company more than I value my YouTube bandwidth.

I own a couple of dedicated servers with unlimited bandwidth (courtesy of OVH), so I decided to try and use one of those as a proxy to YouTube. Here are the things you’ll need:

• A DNS server on your local network (I’ll be using dnsmasq on my raspberrypi).
• A server with squid3 on it.

My router is a Freebox Revolution, and by default the DHCP will give the router’s IP as DNS server. I changed the primary DNS to point to my raspberrypi, and kept the freebox’s IP as a secondary DNS, as backup, in case the raspberry is down.

On the raspberrypi, install dnsmasq:

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Next, configure dnsmasq to hijack all YouTube related traffic to your server:

server="123.123.123.123"
echo "address=/youtube.com/$server" | sudo tee -a /etc/dnsmasq.conf

On my server, I already host quite a few websites, so port 80 is already assigned to lighttpd. I could use iptables to send the traffic from my home network to squid (on port 3128), but then I couldn’t access sites hosted by lighty.

Instead, I opted to use lighty as a reverse proxy onto squid, and added the following rule to /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf:

else $HTTP["host"] =~ "youtube.com$" {
  $HTTP["remoteip"] == "88.88.88.88" {
    proxy.server = ("" =>
      (( "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 3128 ))
    )
  }
}

Also, don’t forget to add mod_proxy to the server.modules directive.

Now, install squid:

sudo apt-get install squid3

Lastly, /etc/squid3/squid.conf needs a couple of lines for everything to work properly:

http_access allow localhost
http_port 127.0.0.1:3128 transparent vhost allow-direct

And that’s it! Now, obviously, this completely and utterly breaks every SSL aspect on YouTube, but I don’t care about those. Another side-effect is that when logging-in to another Google service such as GMail, one of the redirects that happens during the login process will fail. I imagine this is Google ensuring all the cookies are set properly. The workaround to this is to simply refresh the page you were trying to get at initially; the cookies will have been set, and you will be logged in.