[CentOS] Blocking radio streaming

[Ioannis Vranos]

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.