WebCam Down

Hi everyone, just to let you know there is no Internet at the farm currently so the webcam will not be available until it comes back :(

Thanks for letting us know Dan.I am surprised it hasn't gone down before now with all the nasty weather the farm have had.

Cheers. 

I was afraid that the electicity might be down.  I hope it isn't, and that everyone is OK.

Take care, all.

Thanks for letting us know why the webcam is down. Hope all the humans and animals survive this Arctic weather at the farm. Take care of yourselves. All the best from Cindy. x

Hope the water and electricity are OK there. We have had to light the gas fire in the sitting room to back up the central heating (it's supposed to be an alternative!). If it is still cold we shall have to get the electric fan heater down from the attic. Expensive but efficient.

It could well be down until end of play monday, weather permitting, but the reason why it is down now is because of the snow and getting mail delivererd to the farm. We havent been able to get a new modem from the ISP as they cant get to the farm. They estimate it could be delivered on Monday but it is probably going to snow some more so i doubt it will be delivered even by then :(

Unless we can get "O2 Home Broadband" setup on our current Belkin router, we have to wait until the new modem is delivered. I have googled til the cows come home but have found nothign that has worked. You are welcome to try and search google yourselves for resources that might help us get back up online. Every little helps. I have tried search terms such as

o2 broadband belkin

o2 home access broadband belkin

If anyone can find some useful resource please post them here or send them to me by email. Have run out of patience and everyone at the farm is very stressed out by the weather. Howard hasn't had more than a couple of hours sleep without having to get up to keep house water pipes from freezing up. most people can escape the cold by going into their home but even with the gas heater on last night the insides of the living room were covered with ice last night :(

Sorry Dan.  I have a Belkin wireless router here that I'm not using, but that's no good to you.  I jsut hope they are OK at the

farm.  Forget the internet - we will just chatter away.

Helen

Hoping to be back online at some stage tomorrow. Router working now :)

There are still intermittent problems with the Internet at the farm and also it seems Camstreams today have had issues with broadcasting the webcam on third party sites... I believe you can watch the webcam at http://digitaldanuk.camstreams.com until they start streaming on third party sites again (not sure when that will be!)

When the webcam is working, you may notice that the sound quality is improved thanks to a new version of software provided by camstreams :)

webcam down.

Thanks Dan,You need a rest from trying to get the webcam working.

Please get some rest away from the cam.

the sooner we get the webcam going the sooner it can get back to being lambwatch

Dan..

Please do not fuss too much about the camera being down..It sounds to me that if is weather related, you have really no control anyway.  Everyone loves to watch the sheep..but we have been seeing less and less of the girls, as their delivery times approach.  We anticipate seeing the new lambs come spring, so this little weather glitch is just a that.. a glitch.  Better now then when there are babies to look at. Your family has more serious things to concern themselves, with frozen pipes,  heat production, and of course the sheep.. so,  all us LambWatchers don't mind being without a view,  as long as there are no household troubles you and our family have to deal with.. We are very happy to entertain ourselves in chat.  I  don't think there is one LambWatcher on the site who is more concerned about the camera,  than they are about the welfare of your Family.  So, not to worry..We will see the field again at your convenience.                              Thanks for the updates, 

                                                                                                                                                                   Hugs and Prayers,  Karen                 

i am pleased to say the webcam is now back and restored :)

the technical issues have been overcome :)

happy viewing!

When you have a minute could you let us know what was wrong?  Always interested in the reasons why even if I can't always understand them.. :)

So made up having the webcam back and wanting to know how you got it back again, I forgot to say thank you to you, Lynda and Ben for all your hard work behind the scenes so that we can enjoy the picture of the farm.  It is appreciated so much...

Thanks Dan,Ben and Lynda for all your patience in getting the picture back for us.

Like Margaret,I am interested in what the problem was and how you were able to fix it.

Your all Geniuses  and thanks once again for getting the picture back.

Are you sure you want to know...? :P

It's all networking issues with the internet at the farm.

It's quite a complex network infrastructure to get it working; with lots of things talking to each other and lots of things not letting things access the things it needs to in order to work...

Basically it is a mix of Dynamic External IPs combined with static interal IPs.. that is the goal which has now been acheived... but i was struggling to get a static internal network whilst keeping the ISP's DNS settings.. In the end I set the internal network IPs outside the routers DHCP range... and that seemed to fix it, whilst setting the primary dns to the router (which gets the DNS from the ISP) and the secondary to an opendns server.

Once that is acheived, I had to makesure camstreams knew where the webcam was... before it was always in the same place so it was easy. After new year we switched to a dynamic ip address, so had to keep camstreams updated with our latest location... this is done back in the router every time it boots, so had to setup an account with dyndns so that our router could tell the world (and camstreams) about its new IP (address to you or me).

It is just a coincidence that at the same time, camstreams released a new version of its software that effectively does this for u. But as I had setup the router to do this, it kept conflicting on camstreams... One second the router was telling camstreams about the location, then the router would... that is in theory fine, as its saying the same thing... that is until the router gets rebooted... gets a new location... tells the world... but the software with camstreams isnt listening to the router, its listening to the software, which is still telling the world about the previous address... so it was in conflict...

in the end, i stopped the camstreams software from telling the world about where the cam is being broadcast from, set the internal ip of the broadcasting computer outside of the DHCP server range set by the router, configured the router to tell the world instead. DHCP is a thing that automatically allocates IPs to computers on an internal network and every time the router reboooted, it would assign a new ip on the internal network so although the world knew where the cam was being broadcast from, the internal network didnt, so it died. Setting the internal IP on the broadcasting computer itself means the internal IP never changes so the internal network knows where to look for the cam.

The result is that the world knows where to look and so does the internal network... the problem was that sometimes the world knew but the internal network didn't, vice versa, or both! It now is both..

You did ask!!!

Thanks to mum and Ben for all their help with getting this going too and being very patient!

if u just substitute the word "IP" with "address", that might make it clearer!

That is as clear as a bell Dan.. lol.  Joking apart, I understood some of it and some of it went over my head but it did give me an idea of what you had to do  and appreciate your time in explaining it all so precisely. 

Also, anyone who uses the chat room and notices their "in (ish)" location changing , you too are on a dynamic external IP :)

Every time you disconnect and reconnect to the Internet, your location will change.

They are exciting but a pain to do anything technical with!

Thanks for all the technical explanation !!  All I can say is a big THANK YOU for getting the webcam working again. Twenty four hours without a picture makes me appreciate the webcam even more.  

Seeing chatters in different locations each time is fun. We could make it into an on-line geography lesson. 

Technology is wonderful...except when it doesn't work. Plus, it gives us another complaint conversation topic that ranks almost as high as the weather complaints.

Stephanie

Thanks for all your hard work, Dan, and for Lynda and Ben's patience with it all!   Your explanation made a little sense to me, but as long as it all makes sense to you, that's really all that matters.  What a clever whiz kid you are!

I must be one of the very few who doesn't have a static dynamic external IP, as I am always in the same town (boring!), and don't have the fun of trekking all over the countryside like some people I could name.

Thanks for keeping us all up and running.

Helen