[Icecast] Connections explained

[Philipp Schafft]

Good morning,

On Sun, 2023-02-26 at 15:01 +0100, Verten Radio wrote:
> I have a question about regular connections from ip-addresses such as
> 136.244.94.87 - - [26/Feb/2023:14:54:27 +0100] "GET /stream HTTP/1.1"
> 200 133567 "-" "Lavf/58.45.100" 3
> Which never lead to a long lasting connection.
>  
> Can anybody explain what kind of connections these are?

"Lavf" is basically ffmpeg. And such short connections can be probes of
some kind. Short probe connections are common to detect if a connection
should be downgraded to ICY to support legacy codecs such as MP3 and
AAC.

I would guess that you will see another log entry for the same client
with a longer connection time later on. But as the log entry can (for
obvious reasons) only be written when the client disconnected it might
be much later in the log file.

It could also be some kind of monitoring. E.g. some aggregation
services do that so they know the stream is actually be working before
they offer it in listings to the actual user.

Generally speaking probes don't do harm and are hardly a source of
worry.

With best regards,

-- 
Philipp Schafft (CEO/Geschäftsführer)
Telephone:           +49.3535 490 17 92
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