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Netflix was launched here in Portugal one day ago. I was really excited because I was finally going to be able to get an account and start enjoying all the contents that they have to offer.

That was until I checked the catalog…

Currently the catalog has 354 movies or tv shows which is a very poor selection. I didn’t want to turn to VPNs or DNS services that could route traffic through their services but unfortunately I had no choice. Since I work in security, I know how these things can turn south like people found out recently.

But the truth is that I need to trust in a foreign node at some point because without a US IP address netflix wouldn’t show me the full catalog. Searching for netflix and DNS the first link that popped up seemed exactly what I was looking for except that I didn’t want to use their DNS servers for all the requests ( again, security ringing a bell ) a vector for Pharming attacks.

So the idea was to use one of those DNS providers that route traffic through their servers whenever we wanted to access netflix, but only for netflix related requests. Sure I could just setup a DNS server and create a custom zone for netflix but that seemed an overkill. That is how I discovered that OSX supports a feature which allows you to do exactly that: the “/etc/resolver/” folder.

The idea is simple, you just create a folder ( if it doesn’t exist already ) and create a file inside it using the name of the domain that you want to use custom DNS servers. Inside that file you just put the address of the custom DNS servers for that domain and you’re all set!

laptop:resolver xxxXXXxxx$ pwd
/etc/resolver
laptop:resolver xxxXXXxxx$ ls -altr
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  95 root  wheel  3230 Oct 22 09:31 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel    51 Oct 22 09:32 netflix.com
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel   102 Oct 22 10:14 .
laptop:resolver xxxXXXxxx$ cat netflix.com
nameserver 46.101.36.120 
nameserver 46.101.149.135
laptop:resolver xxxXXXxxx$

In this case I used the IP addresses of tvunblock but you can try other ones.

Bear in mind that if you use tvunblock, you need to open their website from time to time to keep active your IP address.

Enjoy your improved list of contents 🙂