Webserver - spec and bandwidth required?
Hi - I am a web designer with experience of SuSE and Apache etc... I have been approached about a particularly sensitive job and I want to get it right!
The job is for a nursery where parents leave their children during the day, the nursery would like to provide a secure way in which the parents can log on through a web site and view their children at the nursery whilst the parents themselves are at the office etc. Apparently it is becoming more and more common for nurseries to do this.
I am looking for as much advice about this as possible, from a security point of view and also a technical point of view.
My initial thoughts run like this... The nursery has two sites at present and may expand. I have identified axis.com as a supplier of appropriate cameras. I will need about 5 cameras per site. I was thinking of installing a SuSE linux server at each site, running Apache and linking the cameras to it but am unsure of what spec to go for regarding the servers and also what sort of bandwidth I am going to require for the connection. It is anticipated that up to 40 people will be concurrently logged on and viewing a live video feed from one of the cameras at any point in time. Although there are a number of cameras at the sites, parents will not view more than one camera at same time.
I hope I have explained the scenario adequately and not left out any important info!
Any advice, pointers to information etc appreciated! Thanks in advance!
andy206uk posted this at 13:05 — 8th March 2004.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
I should imagine, if your gonna be streaming video then you really want to get the highest spec machines you can afford.
I'm guessing that its going to be pretty intensive on the memory and cpu usage, so thats quite important, but then doesnt streaming video require a lot of hard drive space as well? so i should imagine, you'll also need a large, fast hard drive as well.
Because your dealing with children here, it's essential that the servers have secure certificates and the content is only available over a secure connection. Of course, you'll also have to ensure that the streams are only available to registered members.
I personally would only allow new members to be added by an administrator and that only parents are given a username and password. Also, i think that the nursery should add some kind of clause to their signup agreement (i.e. what the parents sign to agree the nursery can care for them) that explains that their children will be available on the website. You don't want someone sueing the nursery now do you?
Andy
mairving posted this at 13:11 — 8th March 2004.
They have: 2,256 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
I once thought about doing something similar for a vet who boarded animals. That if the customer paid a little extra, they could view the pet via a webcam while they were away.
How would they access the webserver? By an IP address? By a sub-domain, sitename.domainname.com? What kind of connection would you have coming into the site? Which camera were you looking at? You wouldn't need all that beefy a machine to do this, but you could probably use some extra RAM. A P4 with 1GB of RAM should be sufficient.
Mark Irving
I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
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