Neighbourhood Watch

It was very wet today, but the Gorse Fox suspects it will be good for the gardens.

There was a simple plan. Help Two Hats set up his new Raspberry Pi. Several of us now have CCTV cameras and he has recently invested in a new one. He want to be able to capture and save the recording over time. beyond what is enabled by the internal flash drive in the device. This should be the perfect application for a Pi.

Set up a Pi at home is easy. Because it would be running with the Gorse Fox's network he can use his configurator to build the device from scratch. This new one will be running with the network at Two Hats' abode. The Gorse Fox decided the best approach was to start from first principles with the "Noobs" installer and the Pi connected to a keyboard and screen. This proved to be very easy (and was certainly an improvement over the earlier implementations). Once the basic configuration was complete, we installed the FTP server software and tested that everything was working. The Gorse Fox recommend that Two Hats acquired an large flash drive that he could use to capture the CCTV images, rather than use the built in "boot' drive.

Two Hats toddled off with a functioning Pi and a shopping list. An hour or so later he called. He had the additional flash drive and could the Gorse Fox help. The flash drive was formatted and and the /home filesystem was moved to it. The Pi's configuration tables were changed and the system rebooted. Everything worked beautifully. Well, so we thought. Certainly the Pi booted, the filesystem was where we expected it to (on the new flash drive), and FTP was still working. The Pi seemed to be functioning as designed. The problem was that we could not get the CCTV camera to send files to it. In the end we resorted to sending a query to the manufacturer. We'll have to see what comes back.