[Icecast-dev] source questions & intentions to patch: yp-timing & auth

[Niv Sardi]

Hi Robin,

First, please let me state that I'm not xiph, nor an IceCast maintainer,
all I'm saying here are my views, but, as nobody answered your mail, I
guess it's better than nothing.

Robin Gareus <robin at gareus.org> writes:
> Looking at the SVN repo: there's 30+ commits since the 2.6.2 release;
> the last one from August 2009. Are there any intentions to roll a
> release anytime soon? Are there any more recent branches?

Basically, IceCast is vastly unmaintained, that said, kh[0] maintains
some code, that is supposed to be quite a bit more advanced.

[0] http://www.xiphicecast.webspace.virginmedia.com/

> I'm currently looking into extending icecast2 (more below) and am
> wondering if I should base the patches on 2.6.2+debian-fixes or
> work from svn-trunk?

 I based my patches (see mailing list history) on current SVN (and so
think you should too =D, maybe even on my un-applied patches ?). I've
kept working a bit on IceCast, and am thinking of putting up a git tree
somewhere soon (as soon as I can clean my current state).

> We are using a cluster of icecast servers as decentralized
> stream-servers for theartcollider.org project and rely on the
> yellow-pages protocol to gather information about available
> streams/servers.

nice, btw, neewbie question, is there an OpenSource generic, prefered
implementation of a yp server ? I googled a bit and didn't find anything
too obvious.

> Basically I'm interested in
>   (1) making YP timing configurable (more frequent updates <30sec)
>   (2) adding a decentralized authentication mechanism: a user can use
>   the same login for a set of mounts on all servers in the cluster
>
> I've tackled (1) already and am pondering (2):

Awesome, patches welcome =)

> The current per-mounpoint auth requires a pre-defined mountpoint as well
> as sharing the config-file among all servers. I do envisage an
> authentication mechanism that can can be shared among a group of servers
> and allows dynamic allocations of mountpoints/credentials.

Well, with master/slave mode you can actually get your config pushed to
all servers, doesn't that help you ?

> It'd be very cool to use OAuth for that but it'd break compatibility
> with too many source-clients.. so the current idea is to patch icecast2
> to call an external service/executable in order to verify access (most
> flexibile) and/or make icecast perform a HTTP request to an auth-server
> that returns 200 or 403 (most portable).

That would be really cool to have, please share patches =)

But I think having it call an outside program is not really elegant nor
eficient.

Implementing new auth methods is quite easy, you can see here for basic
post with no auth (... have that pending in my todolist)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.icecast.devel/1692/focus=1705

Hope it helps,
Cheers,
--
Niv Sardi