Who’s listening in?
January 24th, 2006Have you ever wondered who’s connected to your shared iTunes music library? I’ve would like to have a way to find out, and TCPview is a free Windows utility that allows you to do just that. TCPView (by SysInternals) is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. This is basically modeled on the lines of Netstat, a command-line utility that is included in Windows. The program also allows you to look at connections going out from your favorite P2P application.
Once you get TCPView running—assuming iTunes is also running and sharing music—you will see a list of connections with the iTunes icon next to the process name (iTunes.exe) and process number. Look for TCP connections where the Remote address is something other than yourself. This means that whatever machine is listed there is at least attached to your shared music - don’t use this to strike a conversation with the cute girl across the hall in the library and freak her out!
To find out which song is being played remotely is tricky and not convenient - you will need to perform a search for all mp3 files on your system, and sort by the Last Modified tag.
For the Mac, the RendezWho widget displays connected users and also the song they are playing at the moment.
