TOPIC: How to best stop world cup streaming

Are any of the network admins/engineers on here blocking their users streaming the world cup? If so what methods are you employing?

As a rule we have no problems with our users streaming, but for network stability reasons, and managers wanting office staff to actually do work during world cup matches, we have decided try and block any sites streaming the world cup.

We don’t really have a proxy server (such as websense etc...) that would provide us with any website categorisation, and seen as most sites stream over TCP port 80, rather than RTSP, we cannot block it by protocol.

so far we have resulted to blocking the IP's of the main sites (we are in the UK, so BBC, ITV etc....) and we are monitoring the list of URL's being access during matches to try and spot any foreign sites, and adding them to the list.

Does anyone else have a different approach that might be more successful?

Instead of depriving them of the show try running the feed though 1 only a few computers by feeding the live stream locally. It should cut down on internet bandwidth usage.

If you don't feel like setting that up try using open dns and select block sports, youtube and, entertainment.

we have set up an internal stream from a tv source, but its up to each departments manager wether to send their staff the link

open dns is a good idea tho....

One stream that crippled our Internet usage was Michael Jackson's funeral. We blocked it in several ways: blocked access to all popular search engines, blocked streaming sites, and blocked streaming ports :twisted:

The blocking of search engines wasn't the most efficient idea, but it got the job done. Bottom line is, more than one site will publish the stream...you can't keep track of them all...and neither will uses, so they will use search engines to find those sites...so we blocked them.

For users that legitimately needed access to search engines, we directed them to ask.com and altavista.com, since those are vaguely remembered.

Applying this really depends on the employee-base that you have. If they legitimately need access the the Internet and search engines, then it will be difficult to apply this. For users that primarily need access to internal resources, this didn't affect them.