Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Chapter 12, Watch Your House Across the Network

Wrapping Up

Even though this project used many different applications, setup was rea-

sonably straightforward, and the project itself has proved reliable over time.

This project shouldn’t require any maintenance other than the constant

patching required by IIS, which you can automate with Automatic Updates.

There are a few things, however, that might cause problems:

• Unwelcome visitors discover your cameras.

• Someone figures out how to hack your Perl script.

• Interference from other 2.4GHz devices causes video quality to

degrade.

• Bandwidth consumed by your video feed causes other services on your

network to slow down.

But overall, the risk from this project is fairly low, and the problems are not

severe.

Be sure to back up your computer so you don’t have to start over from

scratch if you have a hard disk failure. When backing up your system, be

sure to include the

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\ directory and subdirectories, and

the contents of

C:\homehacking\.

Extensions

I have several ideas about different ways this project could be used:

• A videoconferencing system could be built into a conference room,

allowing the viewer to switch between multiple camera angles.

• You could implement the ultimate webcam, where two cameras are

pointed at you from different angles, and the third ...