Make your AppleTV use a Squid Proxy

So, I have started toying around with my AppleTV and realized I wanted to make it a bit more sane for my environment.

1- Make it possible to ssh in to your AppleTV. You can do this with atvusb-creator/ (You can find various guides on how to do this online)

2- ssh appletv.local -l frontrow

3- sudo tcsh

I have a slower internet connection at home so desire to run all my web requests via my proxy-cache. The settings are hidden in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist . I went ahead and copied the file and made a backup (always a good idea!) then performed a few edits, replacing the section that reads Proxies with the following (naturally updating my IP address accordingly).

			<key>Proxies</key>
			<dict>
			<key>AppleProxyConfigurationSelected</key>
			<integer>2</integer>
			<key>FTPPassive</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>HTTPEnable</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>HTTPPort</key>
			<integer>3128</integer>
			<key>HTTPProxy</key>
			<string>IP.ADD.RE.SS</string>
			</dict>

Hope these things help you out.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under apple, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Make your AppleTV use a Squid Proxy”

  1. Richard Ford says:
    March 13, 2010 at 12:56 pm

    Is this a hot change or is a reboot needed? Will this also work for the iTunes store? Does that use port 80 and HTTP as it’s protocol?

  2. Richard Ford says:
    March 27, 2010 at 10:28 am

    Hey there are a few proxy entries – as well as some further up in the file that relate to activation and what not. I am having a play now as this is obviously a newer ATV version than when you wrote this. Also once saved are the options activate automatically and immediately? Or is a reboot needed?

  3. Jared Mauch says:
    March 27, 2010 at 11:22 am

    I don’t recall, but seem to think I had to reboot for the changes to take effect.

    I’ve not done any recent testing with this, and have relied on transparent squid proxy to intercept and cache the requests. Makes software updates go quickly across all devices serving it from my cache.

  4. Malath Al Akeel says:
    September 13, 2011 at 8:15 am

    Dear

    I have been trying but preference.plist seem to be encrypted and unreadable.

    What is the solution or how did you open it and edit?

    What software you used to edit?

    vi or vim is not installed on the ATV

  5. Jared Mauch says:
    January 3, 2013 at 5:43 pm

    I edited the files off-box.