[CentOS] Blocking radio streaming
Ioannis Vranos
ivranos at freemail.gr
Thu May 3 22:53:53 UTC 2007
Florin Andrei wrote:
>
> This is the kind of issue best solved by a notice from management saying
> "thou shall not listen to internet radios at the office, or else".
> Then just monitor the network for violators.
>
> Purely technical solutions are not very good. You can block certain user
> agents in a proxy or via a Network IPS, block certain MIME types or file
> types (again, either a proxy or an NIPS can do that), drop HTTP sessions
> that are longer than say 5 minutes (at the firewall or NIPS, and yes,
> drop sessions even if they are active - bad idea sometimes but it will
> greatly annoy the streaming radio users) and add a temporary denial for
> that source/destination IP pair, do traffic shaping to limit the
> bandwidth available to streaming content (at the firewall or router), etc.
> In general, a smart NIPS can help you somewhat.
> But nothing is perfect and people are likely to be smarter than a piece
> of hardware.
>
> One more idea: if most of them listen to the same radio station, just
> install a streaming proxy (or relay) on the internal network and then
> you can have a lot of internal users connected to the same proxy
> (relay), all of them using essentially just one stream to the outside.
> E.g., look at option -r with streamripper:
>
> http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/tutorialconsole.php
>
> Heck, even if two or three stations are the most popular, stream them
> all to an internal relay and tell everyone to use the relay. It's better
> to have just two or three streams, instead of twenty, the users are
> happy, everyone wins.
I think the points mentioned by some people here are useful. I think it
is a mgmt thing and not a technical thing. If users want to listen to
radio, you know, can listen to real radio. Unless there is a technical
problem caused by internet radio, I think the radio thing is not a
technical issue.
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