I live in Germany and would like to watch danish televison, that is geoblocked in Germany. My daughter lives in Kopenhagen and I got a config.ovpn from her, that allows me to join her net and thatway watch the live-programs online. If I do it on my ubuntu-computer everything works perfectly fine with the command openvpn --config config.ovpn
and I can watch live-TV in Danmark.
Thought I can do that too with my raspberry, so I log onto the raspberry from my computer via ssh , then start openvpn with the same command, after transferring the ovpn-File onto the Pi. Everything seems to be fine. If I check the IP of the Raspberry in the danish net with curl http://checkip.dyndns.org I get to see the IP, that the router in Denmark has got.
But when I start the Add-on danish-Live-TV I get the message, that I obviously are not in Danmark. Looks like this Add-on doesn’t go through the tunnel.
I have although installed the script for the programm-addon for OpenVPN und configured it, do use this config.ovpn. OpenVPN gets started, no errormessages at all, but I am still geoblocked.
Do I need to to something to tell OSMC to use the tunnel?
Hi. Before going into the openvpn configuration and other technical details, would you explain how you access Danish live TV from Ubuntu? Are you running Kodi on Ubuntu, as well, or do you simply use a browser?
It’s probably also worth mentioning that there are various checks that can be used to detect the use of a VPN and it’s possible that one of these checks is showing, for example, that you’re using Kodi on a VPN. They might automatically reject such connections.
No. In Ubuntu I access danish Live-TV via browser. If OpenVPN ist stopped, I also get the message, that Live-TV is blocked. After starting OpenVPN I have no problems.
Where do I find those ‘checks’? Can you tell me a name or names for add-ons, that I can use to check the VPN?
So we actually have two very different methods for accessing Danish TV: by browser and by Kodi add-on.
The checks would done by Danish TV., if they did them at all. There are many things that they can look at to see if a VPN is being used, some of which you can disguise and some which you can’t. A simple example: they might check if the default language on the machine is Danish and what the ping time is. Here is a site that can often see if you’re using openvpn. http://witch.valdikss.org.ru/ (needs a browser).
If you can ssh to OSMC, please run the following commands:
Hi. The openvpn log is very strange. It seems like it is not being run with verb 3, which would have given a lot more detail. I assume it is something to do with the way Brian Hornsby’s add-on works.
There are two main issues, as I see things:
You are not successfully seeing Danish TV, and
Openvpn seems to be having a few problems, but might be working well enough for your needs. As a result, I’ll not touch this part for now.
The reason why your connection to Danish TV is being rejected is unclear. The routing table seems to be ok, but the /etc/resolv.conf file shows that DNS is being resolved by the router, which will result in what is called a DNS leak, which means that DNS requests do not pass through the VPN tunnell. (BTW, there is no benefit from obscuring your private IP addresses; eg 192.168.x.x, and it can sometimes make debugging more difficult for us) It is possible that Danish TV is detecting the DNS leak.
Second, your openvpn configuration script contains two lines:
up /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf
down /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf
that will do nothing because the resolvconf package is not installed. However, for now do not install this package because I understand that it can cause problems.
In order to stop the DNS leak, for now I suggest that, instead of using DHCP and getting address details from the router, you configure OSMC using a static IP address and you also define your DNS servers on OSMC. Try these values
IP address 192.168.0.104
Netmask 255.255.255.0
Gateway 192.168.0.253
You’ll need to look on the router for the DNS IP addresses.
I although noticed the thing about the DNS-leak, but was not sure, if this has an influence.
At the moment I cannot test your suggestions, because I am away from home. You’ll hear from me, when I get back.
I also am using openvpn with rpi3/kodi.
I have a simple script that launches on startup, but it connects to the the uk vpn (living in denmark)
When my wife wants to see the danish tv I have to go in manually and kill the vpn or start the danish vpn then it works.
MY question is, is there a way i could get the openvpn to change to a danish vpn or make a script that kills the uk vpn and start a danish on or simply kill the uk vpn then watch danish tv and when exiting the danish channel, revert to the uk vpn again ?
My script is a simple one, which loads openvpn on boot via local.rc.
I think that getting the VPN to drop automatically when accessing Danish TV might be a bit difficult to achieve but there are two Kodi add-ons that will give you control of OpenVPN via the Kodi interface. You’ll need to disconect / connect manually but it’ll be a lot easier than having to SSH to the box, etc.