can a web server isolate clients from activex
We have a webcam that needs to be viewable by the entire college. I was told an hour ago that it requires activex on any client system used to view the pictures. They would like the site to be usable tomorrow. We are talking about 1000+ systems that would need manual installs by someone with administrator rights not to mention my security concerns about having activex running on all these internet clients.
While my manager is telling them we will gladly buy a camera that doesn't require activex if we can, I would like to know if there is some way to use a normal web server to "buffer the image" so normal web clients can view it without activex. The other complication is this camera requires a user name and password. We would prefer that anyone who wanted to could view the image without a login.
As a network security person my knowledge about web servers is minimal so if there is some other answer out there I'm glad to listen.
Thanks.
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
February 1, 2006 6:28 PM
UPDATED:
February 21, 2006 12:05 PM
Answer Wiki:
To put it simply: users will not require an ActiveX component to view streaming media - a media player embedded into the page will work just fine.
I think the real question is in the capabilities of the server pushing the camera. Can it stream the video in the first place? At any rate, this is what you should be looking at, not some platform-specific, browser specific (Windows, IE) solution.
If the camera has the capability to output individual images (say, 2 image every second) it would be elementary to write a script to reload the image twice every second. Depending upon the application, this might be a more stable as well as easier to set up way to go - and the image could just be a simple jpeg and require nothing fancy at all.
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What I was told about the setup is the camera is plugged into some sort of appliance which acts as a web server. When you log in and click live video it times out and notifies you to download an activex package from the vendor, (on our client systems this would require IT rights). The company name on the site is verint. The model appears to be S1600e.
The facilities manager, (notice this isn’t the IT manager), says we don’t need to know anything about what goes on in the appliance. He just wants us to make all of the client web browsers work with it.
Is there some device we can replace this “quality appliance” with? If I had been involved from the beginning, I would have strongly recommended a solution that would work with any generic client without modifications and not require a login.
Barring that solution, is there some way we can get one of our regular web servers to connect to this #%*&% thing and present the image to normal clients?
Thanks.
I ended up installing a turtle beach video advantage card in a workstation and using active webcam to display it on the web. Other than some increased pixelation it is working well. Our clients no longer need to be modified to view the pictures.
Thanks for the help.
rt