All Cows, All The Time

A while back I worked at a company that had a very small internet pipe and quite a few people in the office were consuming bandwidth by streaming music. The solution was my first DNS filtering solution and streaming media site.

The solution involved bind, icecast, and a bit of Perl code. We setup a small OpenBSD server running bind, and I parsed the DNS query logs using Perl. I generated a report that we could scan for potential streaming sites. Once we identified domains that were streaming sites, I created some wildcard DNS entries to redirect our users to the icecast server. We dubbed the icecast the "moosic server". It streamed only MP3s of cows. We even setup a simple website. The tagline for the moosic server was All cows, all the time, with a few pigs to break up the monotony. We even setup a crude website on the server. It was stylized after one of the local radio stations.

The company did not have an AUP, but we began to block other nonwork related domains. The moosic server also became the Uh Oh server later on. We started trapping URLs for NSFW sites and redirecting them to a simple warning page. Uh oh! You attempted to access an inappropriate website. Please contact HR if you think this is mistake. We also trapped DNS queries for a few unsafe desktop that kept getting installed. Quite a few of the staff were confused by the sudden redirection to the moosic server. No one ever contacted HR.

I am not sure what happened to that server after I left the company.