My MikroTik workaround for LaLiga Cloudflare blocks
Spain loves football. Spain also has plenty of people watching football on pirate streams. Those streams often sit behind Cloudflare, where one IP address can belong to a lot of completely unrelated websites. LaLiga spent a while trying to get Cloudflare to take the pirate streams down. That did not work out. Then LaLiga got a court order that lets Spanish ISPs block IP addresses during matches.…
Spain's passion for football extends to pirated streams, which often hide behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare's IP addresses can belong to numerous unrelated websites, making it difficult for LaLiga to get the pirate streams removed. After a court order allowed Spanish ISPs to block these IPs during matches, legitimate sites hosted on Cloudflare's IP addresses would also get blocked, causing frustration.
To combat this issue, a MikroTik router was configured to send Cloudflare traffic through a VPN during matches. A script refreshed a list of Cloudflare IP ranges daily, and a rule was added to mark connections to those IP addresses as going through the VPN. A separate script monitored the DNS answers from Hayahora, a website that provides real-time updates on LaLiga matches.
If more than ten DNS answers were returned, indicating a blocking event, the rule enabled the VPN connection for new LAN to Cloudflare connections. The VPN was not set as the default route, ensuring that other network traffic continued using the regular ISP connection. While this workaround had some limitations, it proved to be a lifesaver for those who couldn't access certain websites during LaLiga matches.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
