Regular hourly increase in listeners

howebzar

Member
Hi, I have noticed an IP address that is adding a connection to my stream every hour (so my hourly listeners and total time are ramping up).
I have no idea what this is, or why, but I'm wondering if I should ban the IP address...but how would I do that?
 
If you're sure you want to ban this IP - you can log in to Shoutcast Admin, click Admin Login for stream and on top you'll see Ban List which allows you to ban IP addresses.
 
Thanks - does this work for IceCast too?
Any idea why someone would be logging on a new session every hour?

Example (modified to obscure IP address partly)

The following listeners are tuned-in now:
Location IP Address User Agent Agent Type Listen Time 
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 5 hrs, 53 mins, 55 secs
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 4 hrs, 53 mins, 55 secs
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 3 hrs, 53 mins, 55 secs
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 2 hrs, 53 mins, 55 secs
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 1 hr, 53 mins, 54 secs
Llanon, X6, United Kingdom 86.nnn.254.17 Mozilla 5 Player Player 53 mins, 54 secs
 
Icecast doesn't support ban/block from user interface. It's possible to block the IPs but it requires manual config file modification - we usually do not provide such a service. I've checked your account and this IP doesn't give you much trouble... Unless it's a real problem, I suggest you to ignore it.

For the "why" question - probably it's some sort of automatic stream ripper.
 
Yeah, I guessed it was ripping my music..not much I can do about it but it's "burning" my bandwidth by adding what looks like a listener every hour of the day. I suspect it won't cause a problem so I'll ignore for now (and just pretend I have a big audience ha ha)
 
Last time I looked, I can see users and ban them in the admin options of the control panel area.
 
howebzar said:
Yeah, I guessed it was ripping my music..not much I can do about it but it's "burning" my bandwidth by adding what looks like a listener every hour of the day. I suspect it won't cause a problem so I'll ignore for now (and just pretend I have a big audience ha ha)
Stuff like this always happens. Some of our other customers had hacker attacks on their radios - hackers tried to bring their radio down.

WBGS-Founder said:
Last time I looked, I can see users and ban them in the admin options of the control panel area.
It's not possible in Icecast. But Shoutcast has this feature.
 
If it becomes an issue, maybe I can move over to ShoutCast? (Seems to have stopped now...maybe they got tired of my music choices...and at 128k seems an odd thing to want to rip...but hey, the world is full of strange people)
 
howebzar said:
If it becomes an issue, maybe I can move over to ShoutCast? (Seems to have stopped now...maybe they got tired of my music choices...and at 128k seems an odd thing to want to rip...but hey, the world is full of strange people)
Unless it's a big problem, I don't think there's much point in changing your server to Shoutcast. Changing the server type will require to recreate your account - all settings will be deleted, also port number and physical server may change.
 
djsoft said:
howebzar said:
Yeah, I guessed it was ripping my music..not much I can do about it but it's "burning" my bandwidth by adding what looks like a listener every hour of the day. I suspect it won't cause a problem so I'll ignore for now (and just pretend I have a big audience ha ha)
Stuff like this always happens. Some of our other customers had hacker attacks on their radios - hackers tried to bring their radio down.

WBGS-Founder said:
Last time I looked, I can see users and ban them in the admin options of the control panel area.
It's not possible in Icecast. But Shoutcast has this feature.
Well, if you host this, then there are tools to block the ip you can one ban ip in icecast yes you can, or you can block the ip using this tool called http://www.peerblock.com/ Well if its hosted its the host job to secure the server after all you pay the service, and that's all there is no longer maintaining the server for you so you might wanna ask your host about that.
 
The only thing you have to watch if you move to a Shoutcast server and you block the IP, it will still show up in your logs that they tried to connect but refused to connect.  I only have the problem like that once in a while when the data server bumps into the connection or some web bot for search engines ping the site the stream is sitting on.  I'm not sure about Icecast, one because I've never had it.  One thing you will want to watch about Shoutcast though and this would depend on the host and the platform such as v1 or v2, most of the times, they'll either log everything or log nothing.  Back a year ago, a lot of our radio servers were hacked into and had the DDOS broke into and a lot of radio servers upgraded their systems so it would prevent these types of attacks, but ones that ping the server will ping the server regardless, and most of the time, it's usually search engine bots.
 
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