Squid, Firewall, and Youtube Problems?

joefish · Guru Joined: 27 Jan 2004 Posts: 316 Location: New Zealand

I'm in charge of managing a box that acts as a gateway for a small number of users (~60), and recently nobody has been able to access Youtube videos from inside the network. The box runs squid, and a custom frontend to iptables that someone wrote for me. The Youtube site can be accessed without problems, but every single video shows "We're sorry, but this video is no longer available", no matter which machine tries to access a video.

This started happening sometime between November and early Feb - not sure when exactly, I was away in that time. Absolutely nothing has changed with the configurations on the box, as I didn't do anything to it while I was away. I've tried an old known-good backup drive, this exhibits the same problem. We haven't noticed problems with any other sites. I tried emptying the squid cache, just to make sure their wasn't something funky going on there.

Any ideas what I should be looking for? Does anyone know if Youtube has changed the way things work on their end? I can post the squid.conf soon when I get access to it, but as I said, nothing has changed here...

Your help appreciated.

Malvineous · Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 1:13 pm Post subject:

A couple of suggestions:

Check that Squid allows access to direct IPs (e.g. http://1.2.3.4) in case YouTube uses those for downloading the videos.
Make sure there are no file size limitations (e.g. Squid blocks access to files > 1MB)
Run WireShark and visit YouTube, see what URL it tries to download and compare that to the Squid config

Sites like YouTube are always changing the way things work on their end, if only as an attempt to prevent people from downloading the videos.