Singing Potatoes
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Open Source for the win
Condescending Linux user

We've filed suit against the Worst Landlord Ever, and when Karen went looking to see if a court date had been set yet, she discovered that (among other things) he'd been in trouble for breaking-and-entering into the house of one of his ex-wives. Needless to say, this gave us some concern, so through the magic of computers and inexpensive Webcams - and a Linux program which monitors the video input and writes out an image whenever it detects motion - I've managed to give us a little peace of mind when we leave the house.

Now, all the images were going into a directory on a machine that isn't connected to a camera, but still... what if he were to steal or destroy that computer? That simply wouldn't do.

So today I set up OpenVPN on the network server and an offsite machine, attached the offsite machine to the LAN over a secure connection, and moved the image storage directory to the offsite machine. OpenVPN was surprisingly easy to get set up; given the needlessly complex procedure for getting one of the Webcam drivers installed, I was ready for another struggle... but it installed and configured quite smoothly.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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