Configuring Asus RT-N56U Router to Access Pandora, Hulu and Other Resources

Introduction

As you know, to access such resources, you must have a US IP address. All the other “lucky ones” had to resort to various tricks, for example using VPN connections, browser plugins (for example, Media Hint for Firefox and Chrome ), and so on. This plugin really gave me the opportunity to listen to the radio on Pandora.com, but I could not watch Hulu.com.
Having seen this publication on Habré, I decided to check the solution on the Asus RT-N56U router with an alternative firmware from Padavan 3.0.3.0-02 .

Setup process

Firmware 3.0.3.0-026 includes the DNS forwarder DNSMasq, which allows, when accessing a specific web resource, send requests to this resource on behalf of the DNS server specified in the DNSMasq configuration file. Actually, all we need to do is to register the names of the resources to which we want to access and indicate that we should contact them through the DNS server of the site tunlr.net (184.82.222.5 and 199.167.30.144).

In the case of the Asus RT-N56U router, connect to it via the ssh client (PuTTY) and add the following lines to the /etc/storage/dnsmasq.conf file (Note. There is another dnsmasq.conf located in /etc/dnsmasq.conf , do not touch it, we only need /etc/storage/dnsmasq.conf!):

server = / pandora.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / hulu.com / huluim.com / secure.hulu.com / 184.82.222.5
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I want to draw your attention here to the fact that for Hulu it is not enough to register only hulu.com, experimentally it was found out that it is also necessary to add huluim.com and secure.hulu.com, separated by a slash (as seen in the example above). After you make changes to the dnsmasq config, reload the router.

The service only supports a specific list of sites for which it will work. Below is a list of other resources (in the ready-made format for dnsmasq.conf), which should also work (I did not check everything):

server = / pandora.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / hulu.com / huluim.com / secure.hulu.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / fox.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / cbs.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / netflix.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / abc.com / go.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / tv.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / pbs.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / vevo.com / fwmrm.net / 184.82.222.5
server = / thewb.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / cwtv.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / last.fm / 184.82.222.5
server = / turntable.fm / 184.82.222.5
server = / mog.com / 184.82.222.5
server = / iheart.com / 184.82.222.5

Now we have access to the resources we need, without additional manipulations whenever we want to use their services from any device connected to the router.