Internet Radio Stations
by -theJestre- (jestre@usa.net)
A new phenomenon is becoming increasingly popular on the Net: Internet radio stations.
Some of the benefits to these stations are that they can reach a far broader audience than a traditional FM transmitter (anyone with Internet access can listen), and the FCC isn't regulating them because they don't use radio waves. I would like to give some basic information on these because I haven't seen much documentation and they could be useful to further link the underground hacker culture together.
The main company propelling these stations is RealNetworks. They make the RealPlayer, RealServer, etc. and use streaming media techniques. Their software is very buggy, but there isn't much of an alternative. Because this is a new frontier so to speak, most people, including RealNetworks' tech support people, don't fully understand all the details. I am the webmaster for one of these stations and have found that most everyone has a lot of trouble setting them up and making them work.
Right now a majority of the Internet radio stations use one of two main Real servers, the new RealServer G2 or the RealServer 5.x. If you have the RealPlayer (downloadable from www.real.com) you will notice it has a list of presets. All of these presets are required to use the RealServer G2 (even though some of them don't). The RealServer G2 has an interesting feature that the older servers don't: a web-based Java monitor and control center. This control center can usually be accessed by opening the web page:
Where realservername is the name of the computer the RealServer is on, and example.com is the domain of the radio's web site. You can also replace everything in front of :PORT with the IP address.
There are a few barriers that one must go through if they want to access the control center, though. First off, you have to know the port number. In the G2 betas the default is usually 8080 but sometimes 9090.
The full G2 version, however, picks a (somewhat) random port value during the installation usually in the 6000s like 6336. The port isn't the hardest thing to figure out if you do a port scan from 6000 - 8000, but the next obstacle is a little trickier. It will ask for a username and password.
The default username is Administrator and the default password is letmein. Any competent administrator will change this quickly, but I'm sure someone out there has left the default settings alone.
If you can gain access to the server the password is encrypted and stored in a file called rmserver.pswd and usually located in Program Files\Real\RealServer or a similar directory. Sometimes the password can also be found in the configuration file rmserver.cfg. The config file is written in XML so if the password is there then you don't have to deal with the encrypted file.
The Java control center allows you to alter anything to do with the RealServer, such as change port settings, restart the server, add/alter usernames and passwords for the RealServer, and other fun oddities such as track the listening audience.
A few notes for someone trying to set up their own Internet radio station: The encoder program (which sends out the content to the server) and the server program must be run on separate computers.
Unless you have very high speed access to the Internet (like a T1), I would not recommend setting up all the software for a station because the server uses a lot of bandwidth. This shouldn't prevent you from broadcasting, though! You can download a "test version" of the RealEncoder (for 5.x servers or below) or the RealProducer (for G2) at www.real.com for free.
The encoders will not work on a Windows NT platform, just Windows 95/98 and some flavors of UNIX. You can then send your encoded stream to a remote server and use their bandwidth! Before you can do this, though, you need to find a server that doesn't have restrictions set on encoders or hack the G2 administrator and change the restrictions. The default is to have no restrictions. It is probably not advisable to "overstay your welcome" on a server because they can track where the stream is coming from. So in other words, do a good job covering your tracks and don't do something stupid like a 24-hour broadcast seven days a week!
Some final notes - if you do a port scan on the RealServer it will usually have ports 554 (for RTSP), 4040 (for the encoder), one port from 6000-8080 (for the administrator), and 8080 (for misc HTTP) open among others. The port 9090 is the default monitoring point and will only be open if a monitor is also open. I recommend scanning in the 9000s before attempting to try anything because the monitor can tell how many monitor connections are open and where they are coming from. If an administrator is casually monitoring the server and suddenly sees an extra monitor pop-up he might get a little suspicious.
I hope this information has been useful to at least a few people out there.
On a final note, all this information has been gathered using the Windows NT versions. Although the other versions are bound to be similar, I cannot say for certain.