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

[Robin Gareus]

Hi Niv,

On 04/19/2011 07:07 AM, Niv Sardi wrote:
> 
> 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.

Thanks. Your answer is very much appreciated.

> 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/

thanks for the link; never crossed my mind to look on 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 ?).

How are your experiences regarding stability (mem-leaks, crackability)
with running svn-trunk?

> 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).

BTW. 'git svn' is a bit tricky - because of the svn externals in
icecast2. I've used git://github.com/andrep/git-svn-clone-externals.git
and needed to fix the module/branch regexps in as well as symlink paths.
It's a bit OT. Let me know if you're interested and I'll elaborate. OTOH
it looks like you already got that part working :)

>> 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.

Not that I know. But it's not complicated to write one; take a look at
http://git.citu.info/?p=tacyp.git;a=summary for inspiration.

>> 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 ?

No, because I don't know the servers. It's decentralized network.

Each participant just installs his/her icecast server and points the
YP-URL to us. If said participant/artists is an individual, there's no
problem with password, but if it's an institution, they like to delegate
auth.

>> 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
> efficient.
indeed, just pragmatic and easy for prototyping. Anyway:

icecast2 trunk actually implements auth_url.c which can query some
remote-server for authentication (added Jan 2009 rev.15621).

It requires a minor fix [1] if one only wishes to do source but not
listener authentication. I've also added 'catch-all' mountpoint option
to delegate all authentication to a remote-server.

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

I'm taking about source auth, not listener auth. Here all streams are
public, in fact I've added a "candid" mode that automatically publishes
streams :)

The patch for fine-grained YP-timing [2] applies (with a few hunks
offset) to both 2.6.2 and svn-trunk. - however the full patch [3] (incl
fixes for auth_url) is for SVN trunk only. Debian packages (called
icecast2-2.6.3-7~extended) can be found at [4].

Cheers!
robin


[1]
http://rg42.org/gitweb/?p=icecast2;a=commitdiff;h=99f4fd5e6ef902bf50d7d05ec56783219c9b5b1b

[2]
http://rg42.org/gitweb/?p=icecast2;a=commitdiff_plain;hp=master;h=yp-settings

[3] git clone -b tac git://rg42.org/icecast2

[4] http://rg42.org/deb/