Work firewall radio

September 26, 2006 5:25 AM

My work blocks everything but port 80 outgoing. O Hoardes, give me a variety of good high-bitrate radio stations on that port! Or, explain how I can relay radio stations on other ports to my work using my home DSL computer or something!
posted by riotgrrl69 to computers & internet (18 comments total)

I mean incoming i guess.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 5:35 AM on September 26, 2006

No I probably mean outgoing.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 5:41 AM on September 26, 2006

If you can post here you can listen to Pandora.
posted by oh pollo! at 5:56 AM on September 26, 2006

Normally, it's a bad idea to listen to streaming stations at work, particularly high-bandwidth ones. Most workplaces don't have more than a T1. A 128k MP3 stream will eat about a tenth of that; you and nine other people would pretty much saturate the whole connection.

We're used to cheap home bandwidth that's not very reliable. Work bandwidth is generally extremely expensive in comparison, but rarely fails. Unless your employer is buying a very large connection, it's an expensive resource, and it's a bad idea to waste it on streaming. Just listen to the radio instead.

If you KNOW there's not a bandwidth issue (and make sure, talk quietly with one of the IT guys... and NEVER EVER use his name or what he said as justification if you get in trouble), then Radio Paradise has some 'firewall-friendly' streams on their listening links page. They are excellent.

The 128k firewall stream link looks broken right now, but the 64k stream link is on port 80.
posted by Malor at 5:57 AM on September 26, 2006

Are you sure its only port 80? A lot of companies keep another port open for reasons I have yet to figure out. I only know this because I pretty much need to be on IM for my work and as a consultant I work at a lot of different client sites. I have this old version of aim (in addition to all my current IM client software) that I refuse to update b/c this version has a little tool that will auto-search all available ports and tell you which ones are active. Could be useful if you can figure out any other open ports...
posted by allkindsoftime at 6:07 AM on September 26, 2006

Malor, this is a very big government connection. I wouldn't worry about bandwidth unless they tell me to stop.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 6:18 AM on September 26, 2006

They're blocking everything but port 80, and they're not running a restrictive HTTP proxy on port 80? I'm surprised.
posted by flabdablet at 6:48 AM on September 26, 2006

There's a WebSense filter, but it doesn't stop radio.

Loving both Pandora and Paradise, ty.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 6:53 AM on September 26, 2006

What you need are SSH tunnels. You'll need to run an SSH server at home some how.
posted by phrontist at 6:58 AM on September 26, 2006

Gawd. You're one of those people that ruins the network for the rest of us.

When I'm trying to look up something useful online, or work in our network-served proprietary software, every frigging thing I do is defined by lag. Why? According to our IT people, it's because of all the streaming video and streaming audio that goof-offs are watching/listening to all day, bogging down the network and web access for those of us actually trying to do our jobs.

If you're not allowed to do this stuff at work, don't come up with a work-around. But an ipod or get a radio. If you need customizable radio, shell out and get XM.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 7:10 AM on September 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

If your network is laggy as shit because people are streaming audio, your IT guys are worthless. Tell them to Google 'traffic shaping'.
posted by Jairus at 7:14 AM on September 26, 2006

I bet the IT people are responsible for most of it.

Seriously, they don't even block BBC radio and video with their WebSense. It clearly isn't something they want to prevent.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 7:19 AM on September 26, 2006

It clearly isn't something they want to prevent.

Are you sure? Have you asked them? You might want to check that sense of entitlement for a moment and show a little due respect to the folks who keep you productive all day. Just because they haven't gotten around to blocking BBC radio (which is probably very low bandwidth anyway) doesn't mean it's open season for you.

And it is inbound, not outbound. If you were serving streamed audio from your desktop, it'd be outbound.
posted by mkultra at 7:59 AM on September 26, 2006

The way I see it, WebSense has a category called Internet Radio and TV. If they wanted to block access to it, it would be a matter of clicking a checkbox, but they decided not to.

Isn't the inbound port the port I'm receiving connections on, i.e. inbound port 80 is what i would run a web server on?
posted by riotgrrl69 at 8:25 AM on September 26, 2006

No, mkultra, it's outbound. Sorry, bzzt, you lose.

riotgrrl69's computer makes an outgoing connection to the remote host's port 80. All data is streamed over that TCP connection. No new connection is made in the other direction - that's not how HTTP works.
posted by dmd at 8:36 AM on September 26, 2006

Ports primer for the confused: dmd has it right, this is probably an outgoing firewall rule.

When listening to streaming radio, your computer connects to the streaming host at some 'port' and receives the stream to play it. If, between your computer and the streaming server there is a firewall, that firewall can say "this connection is to a port that is restricted, I won't allow it."

riotgrrl69 a few suggestions:

As suggested above, search for streaming stations that use port 80. It may not be up your avenue but I know for sure that WNYC uses port 80.

If you're feeling technical and have a high-speed connection at home, you can set up a proxy server and use that.

Other ports that are likely to be open are 443(https), 22(ssh), 23(ftp), and 123(ntp).

If you'd like to explore a proxy server I'll gladly help either here or over email.
posted by Skorgu at 10:20 AM on September 26, 2006

I stand corrected on inbound/outbound.

you might want to check that self-righteous little streak yourself

Wha? The poster is asking for help in basically exploiting a loophole in her company's IT policy, then excuses it by making a flimsily-supported "well, they didn't do X, so they clearly don't care" claim, and shows no interest in the simple task of asking her IT department what their reasoning is.

croutonsupafreak is exactly right about why this kind of thing is bad.
posted by mkultra at 11:11 AM on September 26, 2006

I was going to stay out of the ethics part of this question but having been on both sides of IT I think it's fair to say that if IT wanted radio stations blocked, they'd block radio stations. It's not that hard and having a filtering proxy not blocking a certain category is certainly a signal. Of course it could just be a signal of your IT department's incompetence.

There's a pretty high probability that the port restriction is a security thing to keep monitoring feasible and/or just management stupidity.
posted by Skorgu at 11:56 AM on September 26, 2006