Thomas

Covalant. Three floors down from us.

3 mbps down, 1.5 up. Of course right now I have access to a 100 mbps line here...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4272041.stm Toward the end it implies he was using a capture card and homebrew software.

The BBC story said he wrote the software. It makes sense, the guy has contributed to some big open source projects.

My problems with the windows firewall are these: 1. Automatic support for UPnP is on by default. 2. MS's track record for security. I have to be able to trust a company that sells me my security products. You wouldn't trust a rep that lied to you for your cameras. Same feeling for me. 3. No control over out going packets. To be honest I don't know of any massive exploits for the firewall, but given MS's track record with it (lieing about exploits that they finally fixed in SP2) I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Honestly for any mission critical app I would move the firewall one layer away from the server. Generally the cheapest firewall would be an old scrap box that's running NetBSD or Linux. But if that's not an option I would look at Zone Alarm. Under no circumstances would I depend on the following firewalls: Black ICE Windows Firewall Norton Firewall.

And remember....a hardware firewall is your friend.

Run an anti-virus scan.

Yep. The hows depend more on the camera maker.

The simple method would be to get four monitors and run co-ax to four cameras. Is PTZ really a requirement? Because it will push up the price by roughly a factor of four.

Pelco supports more then coaxitron. They will also accept RS-485 from a DVR.

It's fairly rare for AV software to prevent infections and the kind of infections they prevent are a non-issue for XP embeded. Stopping dangerous scripts isn't a big deal for an embeded system because there is no mail client or browser. Ideally this shouldn't be a problem on even normal systems because users shouldn't be using mission critical systems for web surfing. Remember that on an XP embeded system any kind of virus is going spread via exploits that use existing services. AV software won't stop malformed packets or buffer overflows.

AV software isn't a prevenitive measure, it only fixes the problem. Isolating the system with a firewall is a better solution.

Yep.

Video Insight. PM me for details.

If you look at our demo site ( www.demovi.com ) you could do that through us.

To add my two cents but making any kind of distance shot through a PTZ is going to be impossible. Adjusting for windage, ect is going to be impossible. And the recoil of a good long distance rifle is going play havoc on the mount. It's the kind of info that makes an intresting hypothecial but doesn't work in real life.

I'm moving into a degree of a sales role now and one of my clients has an odd problem. They are trying to monitor a camera at a Natural Gas facility. Normally that's not too big a deal. But this place is way the heck up north. Like near the north pole north. Has anyone found a camera/housing that can survive -45C to -47F? Also need a PTZ for this guy.

Spend the money on the screen...alot cheaper then a broken laptop.

They make little 6" TFT screens with battery packs.

I got through thier site but no matter where I looked I couldn't find that camera.

The client would perfer something ment for that enviroment rather then an upgrade.

I spoke to some of the security people in some of the engery companies here and that's what they recomend. The only thing I need to find is a PTZ now. I was looking at thier Vortex PTZ and they say they can do to -40C...how realistic is that and is -46C gonna be pushing it too far.

The amount of voltage drop depends on the AWG and distance. While copper is a great conductor that doesn't mean it has no resistance, just a small amount of resistance.

On the last point I have no idea.