BSS app iconLast weekend I sat down and built a surveillance system, including an iPhone webapp, for my apartment using my old iBook, an external iSight, the Webcam Software EvoCam and a set of scripts in AppleScript, PHP and some shell scripts.

The whole thing is pretty custom made but I’ll document it here anyway and with a basic understanding of the technology it should be fairly easy to reproduce with whatever hardware you have available. At the end of the post you’ll find a ZIP file with all the scripts I used in the setup.

The set up

  • The iBook has the iSight connected and pointed at the entrance door.
  • iBook is using MAMP to serve PHP scripts and produces some audible confirmation messages.
  • The iPhone webapp shows if the system is armed or not, can start or stop EvoCam, lists all the available surveillance videos and offers a link to the live video stream.
BSS CTRL center

BSS CTRL center

Read on for the whole article with a detailed explanation of all components.
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Yesterday the wonderful Howtoforge had an article that finally freed me from my beloved/hated scponly. MySecureShell offers all the functionality of a proper SFTP server, easily configurable and very well integrated.

To get it up and running on Debian, just download the latest *.deb version from Sourceforge.
Then install it with the following command:
dpkg -i mysecureshell_0.95_i386.deb

Now for every SFTP user you want on your system just do the following (substitute ‘test’ with your desired username).
Add a normal user to your system:
adduser test
Open the file /etc/passwd and change the user’s shell from /bin/bash to /bin/MySecureShell. The line then should look something like this:
test:1111:1111::/home/test:/bin/MySecureShell
Alas, you have a chrooted SFTP only user, without the clutter of numerous additional directories for the chroot. Simple and elegant 🙂

The last step is to have a look through the config file in /etc/ssh/sftp_config, it’s pretty well documented!

This article shows how to run a file-, print-, HTTP proxy- DHCP-, and time server for small and medium enterprises (SME) on one single Debian Sarge system. It is very easy to set up, and management is done with an easy-to-use web interface called eBox so once the system is set up, you can forget about the command line.

…not that I would “forget about the commandline” but this could actually come in handy sometimes.

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