This is too much fun; someone is going to make it illegal soon...
--F.U.Bailout, early mountain biker
The excitement reverb'ed around our office after I installed the Shoutcast server. Ordinarily well-behaved cube dwellers were cranking the tunes, managers wandering around wondering whether to intercede or join the fun. It was the most fun we'd had since discovering WinAmp and the MP3 format about this same time last year. Silly summer reverie? Or something way cool...you be the judge.
Shoutcast is a slim repeater that streams MP3s. It is trivial to install and use and would seem a deathknell to musical copyright as we know it. You can hook it up on a Linux, Unix, or Win32 box and use it to let your friends all around the world listen in on your MP3 player. You can even add a microphone and do fade-ins and fade-outs and pretend that you're Casey Kasem delivering your own Top 40. Howard Stern, look out.
Here's how it works: first, you have to install the server. On Linux, you just unzip the binary, rename it without the version info and run something like install -m 755 sc_serv /usr/local/bin or whatever.
Next, edit the config file, specifying a port, the maximum number of users, a password, the log file location and, if you just want to rebroadcast another Shoutcast repeater, the relevant address and port number.
If you want your server to listen for connections from a friend or two outside the corporate firewall, you'll have to pick an open port. You could use 80, the Web server port, or you could look for an open port with a tool such as netcat. You might want to avoid a wholesale port scan, though, as that could be interpreted as an act of aggression and get your IP address added to the firewall deny file.
As for the user maximum, calculate an intelligent amount. Multiply your throughput max by 0.9 to account for overhead and divide by your bitrate. Thus, a 384kpbs DSL line x 0.9 = about 5 connections @ 56kbps or about 13 @ 24kbps. Work with 24kbps if you want most 33.6 modem users to have access to your streams.
When you're done with the edits, toss the sc_serv.conf file in /etc with the other config files. Due to a quirk in the code, you'll need to launch sc_serv while in /etc or else add a link to the config file from the cwd you launch sc_serv from. So if that's your home directory, try ln -s /etc/sc_serv.conf ~. That's it!
If you run sc_serv in the foreground, it will produce running commentary on everything. Or, you can background it and check the log file later. If you want it to keep running after you log out, maybe try nohup sc_serv.
