Portaller - now with support for Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Netflix and Amazon Video on all devices

    Hey.
    I want to tell you some interesting news about what is happening with Portaller - a small service for using Pandora , Spotify , Netflix and several other services outside the United States.

    In one line, if you don’t have time to go under the cut - except for Pandora and Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Video are now supported, the service works on all devices, including Android clients (why so emphasize it - read below) and you can join it on GitHub .



    GitHub project The
    main thing that happens to him during this difficult time is that he works and remains free and open. If you want to help with something or just “make yourself the same” - please join.

    How much traffic is needed
    When the service was just launched , I, like many commentators, was very skeptical about the power and supply of traffic on the younger droplets in DigitalOcean . Doubts turned out to be in vain - all the services currently supported are able to transfer content directly to the client, using proxying only in order to create / pay an account, log in or send control commands. The total monthly traffic for this use is around 200GB.

    What services are supported
    At the start, the service was able to work only with Pandora and Spotify, and only in the browser or in applications on iOS. Five services are currently supported - three audio ( Pandora , Spotify , Rdio ) and two videos ( Netflix and Amazon Video ). More importantly, they all work on all platforms - in the browser, desktop clients, smart TVs, iOS and Android.

    What difficulties arise?
    I specifically made an emphasis on platform support because of its non-triviality, especially on Android - all of a sudden you will come in handy someday. The fact is that many Android applications use libraries without SNI support when working with SSL(Server Name Indication) and, accordingly, do not transmit the domain name inside the SSL session. Because of this, simple proxying of requests by sniproxy / haproxy becomes impossible - the application behaves, conditionally, as a naive girl, and they get something like this dialogue:

    Pandora: - I came. Come on (waiting for something)
    SNIproxy: - What to give? (doesn't understand what to give)

    Pandora: - I came. Come on (repeating the request and still waiting for something)
    SNIproxy: - What to give? (still doesn’t understand anything)

    Pandora: - Well then, I'm leaving (breaks the connection, shows the user an error message)

    SNIproxy shrugs and writes an error to the log.


    Well, you get the point. If the application uses SNI, then from the first phrase the picture changes - it directly tells which domain it wants to contact and there are no difficulties with proxying such requests. I found only one solution - for each domain with which such an application wants to work over SSL, you need to raise a separate IP and describe it as a separate zone in DNS. In this case, proxying at this address will work with only one domain, and this application, of course, will suit you.

    Almost the end.
    Finally, I want to give you this link - http://portaller.com/setup. It tells how to set up DNS on different devices (in general, no rocket science), but if you need to learn how to access US-only SmartTV applications on Samsung TVs, it can be useful.

    Come, enjoy your health.

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