A couple of weeks ago, my iPod was stolen. This has led to me using WMHD as a music source at work. Unfortunately, my music tastes and what is available on WMHD do not coincide well. As such, my answer thus far has been to set up an icecast stream so that I can listen to my music from work. It turns out that mpd makes a very good source for icecast and can do all the nifty things necessary to make a decent little remote music player.

The only problems that I've had so far are difficulties set up any sort of security on the stream. Icecast (at least the svn trunk) supports streaming over SSL, but there is essentially zero documentation. Also, icecast only supports two kinds of authentication: htpasswd which is essentially identical to apache's htpassword auth, and "url" auth which sends a command to a remote http(s) machine and greps the output for a given magic string to authenticate a user. The problem with the htpasswd is that it is a pain in the ass to configure and the "url" auth doesn't play nice with using a self-signed SSL certificate (fails to authenticate without explaination) or provide a method for ignoring the self-signedness.

Obviously, I don't want to run an open music stream over the internet, so I'm going to have to figure something out. The obvious answer would be to enable ipsec and only allow it to work over ipsec, unfortunately, ipsec connections aren't allowed through my firewall at work.

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