Interception and redirection of streaming audio on an office lan?

January 17, 2007 1:29 PM

Prankfilter: interception and redirection of streaming audio on an office lan?

Too many people on too narrow of a connection at work means that the tech crew has to keep tabs on who is using more than his or her fair share of bandwidth or they'll screw up the entire network for everyone.

Getting a grip on who is doing what is no problem -- we've got the full range of linux stuff available and the DD-WRT firmware on our main router. So, since DD-WRT uses plain old iptables, blocking people from streaming wouldn't be a problem either.

But it's kinda boring. Geez... I mean, we might as well wander over to their desks and tell them to knock it off.

We'd much rather replace the stream that someone is listening to with something else. Something better.

So, maybe you're listening to yahoo radio. Instead of the latest dance hits, you get our station of fart noises or something. (We'll think of something clever later.) Doing this with streaming MP3's is well within our abilities, but is such a thing possible with RTSP?

Does anyone know if RTSP can be redirected with location headers just like a web browser Is there something simple we can do to deploy a RTSP that serves up the same wildcarded content, regardless of what page/stream is requested?

Can this be done?

posted by ph00dz to computers & internet (8 answers total)

You might want to take a look at using Squid if you know the sites they are going to. I was able to route a certain department requesting myspace.com to our business front page, a 'get back to work' from ye olde IT dept. :D

to have even more fun (although this is pretty risky), look into placing a Driftnet system in line and watch as people browse, although it's a excruciating build.
posted by ronmexico at 2:10 PM on January 17, 2007

Because God forbid the drones are allowed to listen to pleasing sounds while they trade their life for dollars.
posted by knave at 2:44 PM on January 17, 2007

knave:

Too many people on too narrow of a connection at work means that the tech crew has to keep tabs on who is using more than his or her fair share of bandwidth or they'll screw up the entire network for everyone.

It's a purely technical issue.
posted by phrontist at 2:49 PM on January 17, 2007

Knave -- they're more than welcome to bring in whatever they want to listen to. Heck, they can even use itunes or whatever to listen to other people's stuff... if it happens within the network, it's all good.

I'm a web developer, not a network cop. Frankly, I could care less what people do, but when their activities start killing essential services that we need to remain up and running... well, that's a problem for me and my crew. Makes our lives harder, yaknow?

So... all that aside, it's a good opportunity to both let people know we're semi-serious about monitoring the health of the network and to play a good prank.

Ronmexico -- driftnet seems kind of fun. I'll have check that thing out.
posted by ph00dz at 3:46 PM on January 17, 2007

knave: "Because God forbid the drones are allowed to listen to pleasing sounds while they trade their life for dollars."

I had an incredibly sarcastic reply here, but I figured I'd clean it up. Here goes:

EDI document trading, remote office VPN access, email and webmail services, and other legitimate business can all be brought to a halt by just a handful of users streaming audio and/or video over the Internet. Business Internet connections are built for reliability over speed, and thus rarely go down, but are more easily saturated.

Your company does not pay for Internet access (hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month) so you can listen to Bananarama. They don't have to allow you any access at all, in fact, so you should be grateful they allow you to goof off with what's left over.
posted by CrayDrygu at 4:18 PM on January 17, 2007

If you figure out what you want to do, but there isn't already a tool to do it, I recommend Scapy as a convenient way to throw together low-level network stuff.
posted by hattifattener at 7:59 PM on January 17, 2007

Can ya do a port forward from the internal IP address in question? It's been a while since I did the linux admin thing, but I was thinkin that with iptables, you could reroute any request from, say, 192.168.1.52 on port 8000 or 8080 (shoutcast) to 192.168.1.4, your internal shoutcast server, serving up the "GBTW" message: "HEY. This is Jon. Stop sucking up our bandwidth and get back to work!". Haha, you could even personalize the messages based on their IP: "Hey, Fred! GBTW..."

Even if it's just for fun, you'll learn some useful tricks in the process.
posted by LordSludge at 10:57 AM on January 18, 2007

Yeah... that's exactly what we had in mind, LordSludge. And yeah, with iptables, we can, indeed, redirect people from one IP to another.

The question is this, then: when you access a stream, don't you typically request a specific file? If this was a web request, we'd just serve up our special content with a custom 404 page, but I dunno if the equivalent is possible for RTSP.

Guess I'll have to experiment.


Ronmexico: driftnet turned out to not be that bad to compile and get up 'n' running under ubuntu. It's pretty silly... but unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you who is responsible for a given image. I found a really great tutorial on ruby + pcap that I played with a bit this morning, but didn't really have a chance to explore more. Maybe I'll throw together a browser-based clone of driftnet if I get ambitious.
posted by ph00dz at 12:17 PM on January 18, 2007