GDHough wrote:

In the last year we've had the auto vandalized twice and have been relieved of three bicycles. I've put motion lights and sound triggers and a new dog all around this little flat. Recently we've discovered irrefutable proof that the perpetrators may actually be from next door.

I am building custom MountainBikes and need to know my items are safe in the home. My solution (since we're already being cased) was to do a little casing of my own. And without getting into a drawn out justification, this is what we've done.

Since the suspects are young, male, jobless, social misfits, they have all freaking day to study our routines. They know when the kids are in school and we are at work. I have set up a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000. The darn thing worked right out of the box. Using 'webcam', a part of xawtv I am able to grab images and ftp them to the webserver. I also archive the images locally and with mencoder, condense them into AVI's. The beauty of this setup is I can monitor our vulnerable backyard entry from any browser in near real-time (currently a 15 second grab). Unfortunately, the xawtv program 'webcam' does not do what it is supposed to do and my work-around is generating big logs and consuming too much cpu on the workstation.

1) webcam doesn't loop at all like it's supposed to.

2) SSH transfer option could not be performed without manually entering a password. I even set up all the authorized keys and it still prompts me for a passphrase - I suspect an 'expect' syntax error, but I at least feel more secure...

3) ProFtp works but again, webcam refuses to keep-alive the connection. My solution was to create a script and run it from CRON. Now in addition to the ftp logons and transfers in /var/log/messages, I'm getting gobs of mail from CRON.

Has anyone had success with xawtv and the webcam looping utility?

farmer6re9

Have you considered http://gspy.sourceforge.net/ ? gspy is designed for webcam based security and may offer fewer headaches YMMV djp -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml