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I took off this past week to extend the holiday, and spend time with the family. Unfortunately, I came down with a cold at the beginning of the week which later turned into a sinus infection. Here it is Monday again, and I’ve almost completely kicked it!

While sick, I didn’t feel like doing much except sit around and work on the computer or watch the occasional TV show. For several reasons, and having a lot of spare time on my hands, I decided to hook the Wii up via a wired Ethernet connection, and route it through a proxy. So, after connecting the USB to Ethernet converter, I proceeded with the configuration. Unfortunately I found the current revision of the Wii firmware doesn’t have an easy way of defining a proxy for a wired connection. (Actually it is easy after you figure it out. You just have to setup a wireless connection first, then change it to wired).

After I got the Nintendo up and running, I hit another hurdle; apparently Netflix (on the Wii) hates proxies too— Well, at least the Squid proxy. I really like to route everything through a proxy for logging, troubleshooting, and control. But the Netflix app wasn’t having anything to do with it. I tried some ACL’s in Squid to tell it not to cache the sites the Wii was trying to go to, but that didn’t work.

Snippets from my squid.conf file:

acl netflix dstdomain .netflix.com acl netflix02 dstdomain .nintendowifi.net:443 #also tried w/o the ":443" acl netflix03 dstdomain .wii.com

no_cache deny netflix no_cache deny netflix02 no_cache deny netflix03</code>

And here are the respective log entries showing it’s not caching for these domains:

1290914315.544 1045 10.0.0.x TCP_MISS/200 4392 CONNECT naswii.nintendowifi.net:443 bfrancom DIRECT/209.67.106.143 - 1290914401.010 372 10.0.0.x TCP_MISS/200 279 POST http://rcw.wc24.wii.com/cgi-bin/check.cgi bfrancom DIRECT/133.205.133.198 text/plain

Since that didn’t work, I bypassed the proxy for anything from the Wii IP in my FreeBSD pf.conf:

rdr on $int_if inet proto tcp from !10.0.0.x to any port www -> 127.0.0.1 port 3128 pass in on $int_if inet proto tcp from !10.0.0.x to 127.0.0.1 port 3128 keep state

This works great, and routes regular Wii traffic through Squid. I’d really like to get the Netflix application working through squid in the future.

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