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Moving away from anonymox - UK IP address required
Hi
Problem statement:
I live in a large house-share in the UK. In the past we've had problems when sharing the same IP address in our residential connection. I.e. some services won't work when we access from the same IP address two different accounts (e.g. banks like nationwide or barclays), some even caused our accounts to be "linked" and blocked (paypal), with massive discomfort. In general all kind of unpleasntness.
The way I dealt with this in the past, was to have a different anonymox server for each person (they used to have up to 9-10 different uk servers). Before you start telling me that now I have an even bigger problem, as some of those ip addresses might be used by other people at the same time, for some reason this didn't happen. I'm not sure why, but I think providers maybe somehow detect that is an anonymised IP server, and are ok with multiple connections going through that. In any case, it worked very well for over a year. Each of us had their own anonymox and everything was good.
Now anonymox (1) is not free anymore for Uk servers (that would be ok, we can pay for one subscription), and (2) only provides two UK servers... We can't have one for each of us anymore.
So my next stops have been:
- Tor - I can't seem to be able to enforce a GB exit node; and also, I suspect ToR IP addresses are scrutinized much more.
- Getting low cost UK ip addresses - the lowest I could get is around $10 per year. (dstn.uk - tiny). I simply run a multiple socks5 server on ssh, on a local server, then everybody connects to that by setting [local_address, port_n], where n goes from 1..15 say. So for 15 connections this costs $150. Could do that, alhtough they will all be coming from the same block, but I suspect it might work, as it worked ok with anonymox for 1 year with no problems.
- PNGate. Looks really good. I'd have to code the socks5-ification on a central server, but I suspect I could just wrap each vpn connection in different docker container, and have whatever number of them running at the same time.
- Another solution is to use a service like IPVanish, and have a local server that manages a "pool" (you can only have 5 connection on at the same time with IpVanish). Seems convoluted and I would have to code the pooling bit myself. Need to have python clients on each machine to work out what socks proxy they need to use on the fly. Mote contention, because all 5 connections might be taken.... Too many problems.
- Tethering from mobile phones. So fiddly. We do that sometimes. We don't like that. Rubbish quality indoor and a lot of fiddling around. also potentially expensive.
Anything else? Anything more cost effective than $10 per YEAR (with comparable usability)? For some reason also I don't like the feeling of all IP addresses coming from the same "block", so having other providers around that price range would be good to diversify as well.
PS: I don't need to send spam email. I don't need to run port scanners. I don't need to download torrents. I don't need to run seed boxes, frauds etc etc etc. Not even video streaming or netflix etc. Just using the connection for regular, relatively low bandwidth logins to banks, shopping websites (ebay), payment providers (e.g. paypal) in the UK etc.
Comments
Give everyone a $12/mo VPN (cheap VPS + Nyr's OpenVPN script). One VPN per user. You can set that up in a few minutes each.
Users connect to the VPN and then all their traffic shows up as that VPN's end point.
I've done this at home for years, and also when traveling in hotel wifi, etc. But even at home, my PC autoconnects to a CatalystHost VPN in Dallas and all my traffic flows through it. Same for my laptop. My wife doesn't care, so she gets the Comcast IP. Etc.
Apologies, I have amended. I can get an IP through dstn.uk (tiny) with $10 PER YEAR.
I was looking to improve on that (cheeky me; nobody understands anything, and I don't want to pay additionally considering they have the tethering (rubbish) alternative). I know that's nearly impossible with the VPS route. But I'm ok with alternatives, like the anonymox one, which was completely free, albeit it disappeared.
Given all the mobile carriers tend to use CGN (Carrier grade nat) I find it highly suspicious a bank would block you for 2 logins from the same IP unless your IP has a very bad reputation and if that's the case and you are sure you didn't do anything time to moan at the ISP for not keeping their IP blocks clean.
Also some sites seem to like blocking data centre IP's some of mine appear be blocked from the online.net console (But weirdly not from accessing C14)
Not sure about current situation, but last time I was in UK (2+ years) Three was giving out public IPs to mobile phones therefore avoiding any kind of NAT.
For some reason I think you've reached the wrong conclusion on what actually needs to happen. Unless you have 10 people (wow) using the same residential connection and are incredibly active you shouldn't have any issues with this sort of stuff. Would it be viable to just give a couple of the more active users a VPN and just leave the "normal users" (Netflix/Facebook/Email) on the normal IP? This would make is substantially cheaper.
I do not know... at least where i live most ISP-s provide nat by default now, with an option of buying an ip for 1-2$/m. As a result most people use shared IP-s and have no issues with it. And knowing this, most sites either already stopped identifying users by ip-s or are going to do it in near future. The only place i can think of, where shared ip-s may cause issues, are some private torrent trackers...
Also, $10/y for ip seems cheap already, i doubt you will find significantly cheaper options...
Just to clarify.
The issues have already happened, more than one year ago. As I said, paypal was linked and blocked for 5 people. Nationwide and Neteller were unable to login more than one person at the time. Try to go now on neteller or nationwide, and login with two different accounts for the same network. you won't manage.
And many other cases, these are just those I remember off the top of my head. Same IP, for the same account type (exacerbated if at the same time) == all kind of weird conflict problems.
Also, this is not related to the IP address being "blacklisted" or whatever. It wouldn't matter who the provider was, we had multiple ones in the preceding period (EE or talktalk; and IPs by those providers are allocated dynamically), and it wouldn't make a difference.
Issues completely disappeared once we started using one IP per person with anonymox.
If there is nothing cheaper than $10, per IP, per year I will do that. Just to reiterate: it doesn't have to be a VPS. A VPN that supports multiple connections (and the ability to specify a different IP address with each connection) would do.
Without the need to have a personal, static ip as I am getting with the VPS: just a provider (anonymising/VPN/ whatever you want to call it) that lets me choose a UK Ip from a pool of 15-20 different ones every time I connect.
I tried with ToR but a lot of stuff doesn't even load, even with GB exit nodes. VPNGate was another option on my list but it might not be worth the effort: I might just pay and be done with it. I had this working for free with anonymox until last week hence I'm wondering, can I find something similar? It doesn't seem possible. Getting ready to fork out.
"Would it be viable to just give a couple of the more active users a VPN "
But how much does that cost? That would be more than the VPS I've mentioned. What's the saving with that?
Plus it introduces the requirement of determining who the most active users are. Which wouldn't even be the full story, as I'd have to work out which users are causing the most collisions who might not necessarily be the most active.
I just don't want to ask myself any of these questions. I want it to work perfectly for everybody as it was last week.
OVH can geolocate it's failover ips to UK if that helps. You'll only be paying 2 euro/ip(one time fee without VAT) and the server is 2.99euro/month(also excluding VAT), but i've no idea how to link each ip to a certain user via openvpn, maybe someone else does.
I think he's looking to set it up so that's handled by a router and then they're just assigned the IPs over DHCP, or enter the IP settings manually in and the gateway/router works it out and they get internet over that IP directly to their phones/computers.
that sounds like a nightmare, thank god that hasn't happened when I use it on my schools wifi (3 buildings with thousands of people/devices online and all under 1 IPv4 address)
As a word of caution. Stay away from dstn.uk. Search for dedistation around the forum, and you'll find out why..
Thanks Dmitri, I came to the same conclusion after perusing the forum.
I'm going with https://www.deepnetsolutions.com/openvz-vps.html CAD 13 ~ £7 .