Icecast Streaming Media Server

[stereotype]

Hi
Does anyone know of an easy way to block selected user-agent strings?
I know it can be done fairly easy on Apache via the .htaccess file...
Does Icecast have any such capability?

Cheers

Max

[karlH]

You cannot rely on blocking on useragent strings as the apps that you tend to want to block often allow the useragent strings to be faked.

karl.

[stereotype]

Hi Karl

Yeah I understand that, but I have a very specific need.
Since I don't wanna bore you with too many details, I'll just say that our stream is tied to our hardware, and I want to restrict usage to the hardware's user agent string...
The easiest way I have found is to do a proxypass via apache, and let apache filter the strings before forwarding the connection on to icecast.
I haven't had the time to try that yet though...
Any easier way to acomplish this from within icecast?
Whitelisting would be the best option, but blacklisting would of course be fine too...

[karlH]

there is a user agent filter tryout in kh (works in a similar way to IP allow/deny) but the only general way is to use url auth and deny/allow listeners based on the user agent field that is passed on the listener_add.

karl.

[stereotype]

Can you point me to more info on the user-agent stuff on kh?
Is kh ok for production use?
Thanks again Karl...

[karlH]

Just look at the sample xml files for the <deny-agents> tag. It works like the IP files in 2.3.2 except that it can also take wildcard matches. Yes it is ok for production use.

karl.

[stereotype]

thanks karl
that looks very good

just a few final questions:

1. any way of blocking empty agent strings?
2. are the strings case sensitive?
3. with regards to the format of the file, do i just list the bare strings one per-line? (should I use quotes, double quotes or perhaps any other special characters?)
4. can i use more than 1 wildcard? (i.e. would *amp* block "winamp")

thanks again...

max

[karlH]

1. Is that even valid, useragent:\r\n, blank lines and lines beginning with # are ignored from those files.

2. yes

3. it's one possible match per line, special chars are * ? and []

4. yes.

karl.

[stereotype]

thanks a lot karl

[stereotype]

Karl
I've given kh a try and had all sorts of trouble.
I've also had troubles when moving from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 and this seems quite similar. Like for example, the xml config file that was fine with 2.3.1 wouldnt work with 2.3.2, with no clues to what was wrong.

Anyway, with kh, the web admin pages don't display properly and some odd things seem to happen... Tried both kh1 and kh2 with not much luck...
Tried both the 2.3.2-release and kh xsl files with no luck...
After a few hours of random madness I gave up...

You said kh was OK for production use, so am I missing something?
Does it require any library updates or something else?

[karlH]

If you have issues then let us know, it's the only way to resolve them. As you haven't said what you have configured I can't say what is wrong or possibly a bug. Let me know the specifics of what you are using along with the xml and log file contents.

karl.

[MATPOC]

Some days ago I found strange requests in the log of my icecast server - many requests of /<mountpoint>/index.html. All of them contains "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" user-agent string. A quick search said that this is the Internet Explorer for Windows 2000 - strange thing for our days. Deep search said that this user-agent means viruses of trojaned hosts. So your new feature is very useful to block junk traffic.