Who took the music from the iTunes jar?

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March 30, 2007

Who took the music from the iTunes jar?

Posted Mar. 30, ’07, 8:42 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Tips

iTunes Sharing We’ve regaled you with the ever-useful lsof command before, but here’s another handy way to put it to good effect. iTunes will tell you how many users are connected to your shared library (Preferences -> Sharing), but have you wondered just who those users are? Here’s how to find out.

The command you’ll want is lsof | grep iTunes | grep TCP—note that those straight line characters are pipes, not lowercase L’s (to make a pipe, hold shift and hit the backslash key, the one above the return key). If you have connected users, you’ll get a few lines back that look like these.

iTunes 438 dmoren 17u IPv4 0x01994570 0t0 TCP *:daap (LISTEN) iTunes 438 dmoren 18u IPv4 0x01807744 0t0 TCP 192.168.1.23:daap->192.168.1.110:64658 (ESTABLISHED)

The first line tells you that iTunes is listening for connections. The subsequent lines will tell you who’s streaming your tunes. You’ll notice two IP addresses there: the first is the IP address of the server (your computer), the second is that of the computer connected to your library. Multiple lines of this variety mean more than one person is connected. Of course an IP address won’t get you very far, unless you, like me, have memorized the IPs of every computer on your LAN. It was a slow week.

[via Lifehacker]

4 Comments

a c said:

there is a widget that you can get, i think its itunes connection monitor, that will show you te ip's of people streaming, and even the song that they are streaming.

March 30, 2007 8:56 AM

Anon. said:

Related and useful:

"Shared Music Monitor" by Neil Evans. A script that updates your Library's play counts and last played dates as connected users play tracks.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=3#sharedmusicmonitor

March 30, 2007 10:42 AM

axel said:

this is the link to the widget
http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=78

There is also a god app called Flame http://husk.org/apps/flame/ that helps you watch your bounjor network.

March 30, 2007 11:33 AM

Kirk McElhearn said:

I discuss a better way - GUI - to do the same thing in this Playlist article: