Some countries block some services access. For example, recently YouTube and Discord got blocked in Russia, where I live. This little guide will help you bypass these restrictions on SailfishOS.

Local service blocks are usually done by DPI (Deep Package Inspection). The provider looks into the package and, if notices that it is going to a blocked service, returns an error instead of routing it to the destenation.

There are many methods to bypass DPI, but most of them run as a proxy server modifying packages structure so they are not understandable by the provider but understandable by the destenation. I don’t have a big knowledge on this, if you want to read more about this I recommend you reading this post in Enderman’s telegram channel.

So, we need to run a proxy server on our phone and use it as the global proxy server in settings. Before, I used SpoofDPI, but now the method used there is patched (at least in Russia). There is also zapret, but I haven’t tried it. For now, I’m using ByeDPI.

ByeDPI has a problem, it uses SOCKS. And SailfishOS only supports HTTP proxy. We could also use another popular tool zapret, which is better for our case because it uses HTTP, but that is for another tutorial. Later I might release the tutorial for zapret as well. If I will then I’ll mark so at the top of the page.

So, we decided to use ByeDPI. Since it uses SOCKS, we need a SOCKS to HTTP forwarder, and we’ll use Privoxy for this.

Make sure that using two proxies in the background affects the battery life a lot, and I recommend you waiting for a tutorial on zapret for now.

Zapret is much better for SailfishOS. I’ll try to make a tutorial on it later. If you are OK with ByeDPI, then here is the actial tutorial:

  1. Install Chum, and install Privoxy from there.
  2. Enable Privoxy
    • Enable developer tools and set an SSH password first, then open freshly installed Terminal app
    • When asked, enter your password
    • You can use up/down arrows to navigate through command history 
      devel-su systemctl enable harbour-privoxy
devel-su systemctl start harbour-privoxy
  3. Download ByeDPI from releases page, unpack it
    • For armv7hl devices, download armv7l version
    • For aarch64 devices, download aarch64 version
    • For i486 devices, download i686 version
  4. In Terminal, move ByeDPI binary to /usr/local/bin/:
    • When asked, enter your password
    • You can autocomplete paths using tab key
    • Replace /home/defaultuser/Downloads/ciadpi-aarch64 with your actual binary path 
      cd ~
devel-su mv /home/defaultuser/Downloads/ciadpi-aarch64 /usr/local/bin/ciadpi
  5. Try running ciadpi. It should show nothing now. If it shows an error, you have done something wrong. Press control+c to stop byedpi
  6. Configure a systemd service to run byedpi in the background
    1. For this, I recommend you installing file browser and the root extension from OpenRepos
    2. Open file browser with root mode
    3. Go to Root (/), then etc, systemd and finally system
    4. In up menu, select Create new…, empty text file and byedpi.service as the name
    5. Click on newly created file, swipe to left, and select Edit in the menu
    6. Type: 
      [Unit]
Description=SOCKS proxy for DPI bypass
Wants=network.target
After=syslog.target network-online.target
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ciadpi --oob 1
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3
KillMode=process
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
    7. Save the file
  7. Enable byedpi 
    devel-su systemctl reload-daemon
devel-su systemctl enable byedpi
devel-su systemctl start byedpi
  8. Configure Privoxy to forward byedpi
    1. For this, I recommend you installing file browser and the root extension from OpenRepos
    2. Open file browser with root mode
    3. Go to Root (/), then usr, share, harbour-privoxy and finally conf
    4. Click on config.sailfish, swipe to left, and select Edit in the menu
    5. At the top, insert a new line and type: forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:1080 .. Do not forget the dot at the end
  9. Restart Privoxy in Terminal: devel-su systemctl restart harbour-privoxy
  10. Configure SailfishOS to use Privoxy
    1. Open Settings, WLAN, Advanced and enable Global proxy
    2. Choose Manual and click Add proxy
    3. Type 127.0.0.1 as the address and 8118 as the port
    4. Click Save
  11. Done! To temporarily disable the proxy, use the Global proxy toggle. You can also add it to the top menu.

Uninstallation

This is required for replacing ByeDPI with zapret

  1. Disable global proxy in SailfishOS settings. Reset other proxy fields if needed
  2. Disable Privoxy: 
    devel-su systemctl stop harbour-privoxy
devel-su systemctl disable harbour-privoxy
  3. Uninstall Privoxy in Chum or on the home screen
  4. Disable ByeDPI: 
    devel-su systemctl stop byedpi
devel-su systemctl disable byedpi
  5. Remove ByeDPI service
    1. For this, I recommend you installing file browser and the root extension from OpenRepos
    2. Open file browser with root mode
    3. Go to Root (/), then etc, systemd and finally system
    4. Remove byedpi.service file
  6. Remove ByeDPI binary. In terminal: devel-su rm -f /usr/local/bin/ciadpi
  7. Done! ByeDPI or Privoxy is no longer running in the background.

Troubleshooting

You might need to update the browser to gecko 91. Without this Discord login refused to open for me (proxy worked fine on other blocked services).

If your battery life got worse, then wait for me to release zapret tutorial. Once it will be released, uninstall ByeDPI using instructions above and install zapret.