IP surveillance

IP surveillance as we all know is the future of surveillance thanks to the enormous benefits it offers including cost effectiveness and ease of deployment, expandability, and flexibility in use. Surveillance cameras can be connected over the Internet to allow monitoring from anywhere in the world. With the popularity of wireless cameras, IP surveillance can be extended to areas where wiring is not possible or not cost effective. To implement an IP based surveillance three things are required. One needs a network that can be wireless or wired, cameras that will define quality of feed, and monitoring and recording system that will store and analyze recorded footage. Few points that should be kept in mind include security of footage while it is transferred from camera to monitoring system and access to footage. This can be taken care of by using encryption techniques and authentication. Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layers (HTTPS) and VPNs can be effective in securing data while it is transferred.

Application areas
In this section, we will try to find out application areas of IP surveillance. Application areas of this technique are diverse and include scenarios where safety, security, monitoring and quality control is high on priority. With the recent Mumbaiterror attacks, the importance of IP surveillance has further increased and in a country like India, where law enforcement bodies are under tremendous pressure due to huge population, IP surveillance can increase their reach. Below are some areas where IP surveillance can be effective.

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Counter terrorism

Live visuals from 26/11 attack came from CCTV cameras installed inside the hotel. These feeds were helpful to security agencies involved in that operation. This has again proven importance of surveillance to counter terrorism. One important point here is that, IP surveillance can be used as a preventive measure. Consider if IP cameras are installed in sensitive areas like busy markets and train stations and intelligent analysis of videos is done at the back end. Here an automated alarm is raised if there is any triggering pattern difference. For example, in busy markets camera can raise alarm for bomb if an object of a particular size and shape is found lying for too long. Now taking IP surveillance to borders can control movement across borders. Instead of patrolling, intelligent surveillance can be more effective especially at night (with usage of thermal cameras).

Financial institutions
There is a clear guideline set by RBI for banks maintaining cash chests to have IP surveillance and ATM machines fitted with cameras. These techniques besides being effective in securing assets also help in enhancing confidence of customers. Cameras can be of great help in preventing robberies, check frauds and in crime investigation. Intelligent surveillance can be used to raise alarm if a particular face is recognized that was involved in check fraud or other safety breach. With advances in technology behavior recognizability is even possible.


This illustrates a typical IP surveillance system. Once all components are in place, footage from cameras can be obtained using IP address of cameras.
Transportation
There is a huge requirement of surveillance in this domain. IP based cameras can be installed at traffic crossings helping traffic cops to penalize people from jumping signals or over-speeding. One can fit cameras at sensitive buildings restricting cars to tale gate while entering premises. Alarm can be raised if the distance between two cars entering perimeters is too short. One great example of this technique is automatic toll collection booths on national highways.


Intelligent surveillance makes it possible to thoroughly analyze feeds coming from cameras and then generate events based on those feeds. Typical monitoring interface of an IP based surveillance system. Proper analysis of feed is important for effectiveness of this technique.
Data centers
Real asset to an organization is information in the form of digital data that lies in a data center. This sensitive data needs to be protected at any cost, and IP based surveillance is fast being adopted in such data centers. Intelligent surveillance can raise an alarm if more people than what's been specified enter a data center.

Besides the domains mentioned above, IP surveillance can be effective in educational institutes and factories for maintaining quality control. Retail shops can also be benefited from these techniques as they protect against theft and other type of criminal activities.

Mount NTFS, FAT32 Partitions On CENT-OS

As you know, you can store your data in different physical storage devices, like floppies, CD-ROMs, and hard disk drives. Your hard disk or disks are also very likely split up into different partitions with different filesystems.

If you're migrating to Linux from Microsoft Windows, you're probably used to accessing all your filesystems very easily: you just boot up your puter, go to My Computer, and find all your Windows partitions there immediately. For example, if you have a second hard drive (or a second Windows partition), it automatically appears as D:\ and you can immediately access it. The same goes for floppies, CD-ROMs, digital cameras, and other storage devices - you just plug them in, and you'll be able to immediately access them. However, this isn't the case in Linux.

You're probably a bit confused at first: you put your floppy or CD into the drive and start wondering why you're not able to access it! This is because your floppies, CDs, hard disk partitions, and other storage devices must be attached to some existing directory on your system before they can be accessed. This attaching is called mounting, and the directory where the device is attached is called a mount point. (Now a days Ubuntu, fedora and other user friendly Linux flavors automatically detects windows NTFS and other partitions.)

After the device is mounted, you can access the files on that device by accessing the directory where the device is attached. When you're done and want to remove the floppy or CD or other device, you need to detach, unmount, it before removing it.

How to mount any partition

Mounting is done with the mount command.

When mounting, you must tell the mount command what is the device or partition you want to mount and what is the mount point. The mount point must be a directory that already exists on your system. For example, to mount your floppy:
$ mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

In this example, /dev/fd0 is your floppy drive, and /mnt/floppy is the mount point. Now when you access /mnt/floppy, you'll actually access the files on your floppy.

Usually /dev/fd0 is your floppy drive, although some distros are configured so that /dev/floppy is the same thing as /dev/fd0. Usually your CD-ROM is configured the same way: /dev/cdrom is your CD-ROM device (or, more specifically, /dev/floppy is a symbolic link to your actual floppy drive, and /dev/cdrom is a symbolic link to your CD-ROM drive).

Where to mount partitions

Although many Linux distros have directories like /mnt/floppy or /floppy created by default so you can mount your floppies there, you're not forced to use these directories. Using the mount command, you can mount your devices or partitions into any existing directory you want!

Usually your Linux distro is configured so that one particular directory is the default mount point for one particular device. In most distros it's /mnt/floppy or /floppy for floppies, and /mnt/cdrom or /cdrom for CD-ROMs. When this is the case, you don't need to tell mount the whole device name: just give either the device or mount point and you're ok. For example, if /mnt/floppy is the default mount point for /dev/fd0 (or whatever your floppy drive is), this would mount your floppy:
$ mount /mnt/floppy

The default mount points for different devices are configured in a file called /etc/fstab. The root user can freely edit the mount points configured in that file.

How to unmount partitions

Unmounting is done with the umount command. No, I didn't make a typo: the command really is umount, not unmount.

When unmounting, you'll need to tell umount what mounted device to unmount, either by telling what's the device or the mount point. For example, if /dev/fd0 is mounted to /mnt/floppy, you'll unmount it with
$ umount /mnt/floppy
or
$ umount /dev/fd0

It's not wise to remove the floppy from the floppy drive without unmounting it first! In the worst case the data you were writing to the floppy wasn't written into it yet. With CD-ROMs you can't do this: the tray won't even open if you haven't unmounted the CD first.

Installation of various third party packages and softwares

installation of software in linux


Sometimes the packages you want to install need to be compiled in order to match your kernel version. This requires you to use source RPM files:

Download the source RPMs or locate them on your CD collection. They usually have a file extension ending with (.src.rpm)
Run the following commands as root:


Compiling and installing source RPMs with Fedora can be done simply with the rpmbuild command


[root@bigboy tmp]# rpmbuild --rebuild filename.src.rpm

Here is an example in which we install the tacacs plus package.

[root@bigboy rpm]# rpmbuild --rebuild tac_plus-4.0.3-2.src.rpm
Installing tac_plus-4.0.3-2.src.rpm
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.61594
+ umask 022
+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD
+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD
+ rm -rf tac_plus-4.0.3
+ /usr/bin/gzip -dc /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/tac_plus-4.0.3.tgz
+ tar -xvvf -
...
...
...
+ umask 022
+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD
+ rm -rf tac_plus-4.0.3
+ exit 0
[root@bigboy rpm]#

The compiled RPM file can now be found in one of the architecture subdirectories under /usr/src/redhat/RPMS directory. For example, if you compiled an i386 architecture version of the RPM it will placed in the i386 subdirectory.
You will then have to install the compiled RPMs found in their respective subdirectories as you normally would.