We have a simple CCTV system in our office that shows a live image from each of our security cameras. The CCTV system doesn’t have an API or any method of extracting the live images. You can however view the image from another browser by creating a basic HTML page with the image link:
http://192.168.1.6/media/getimage_sid.php?sid=a09c4ecb72bade3802e7bf563b0d0bd6&card=1&camera=1&width=384&height=288
This works perfectly, until the session expires and/or timesout. I don’t know very much about cookies and sessions but when I inspected the page in Google Chrome I noticed the following cookie:
Name Value Domain Path Expires Size
PHPSESSID a09c4ecb72bade3802e7bf563b0d0bd6 192.168.1.6 / Session 41
there is also a HTTP column and a Secure column but both are empty.
What I am trying to figure out, is how do I keep that cookie alive or trigger it to recreate with the same value? I’m assuming that a rake task to log in to the system wouldn’t work because that would reset the session ID every time.
The intranet is a Rails application, so one way would be to create a script that logs in and stores the current session ID to the database and then putting the last recorded sessions ID into the IMG links from the database. It’s a bit of a long way around though, I’m hoping for a better solution.
I have read a few articles showing how to do this with AJAX but that would appear to rely on the intranet being viewed all the time. I need this to work if no-one has viewed the intranet for the weekend.
This project is so we can put a couple of live (when the page refreshes!) images on our intranet so we don’t have to continuously go to the CCTV system, log in and find the right camera just to see who is at the garage door etc.
Any help would be appreciated.
It’s a bit of hack but I’ve made a small script to pull in the latest session ID and then put it into the image links.