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.