Motion problems

[Karl Auer]

On Mon, 2019-01-14 at 12:02 +0000, Grizzly via ubuntu-users wrote:
> I installed Motion on Bionic, configered it for streaming and tested
> with browser via localhost with no problem, screen showed output from
> integral webcam

Good initial steps.

> Next step was check over my local network, but this failed, added a
> service & firewall rule to my router (aka port forwarding on other
> routers) still no joy
> 
> Any pointers to what I may have missed or got wrong?

At this point we need a map of how the bits are connected up. You say
you "checked over your local network" - from what? To what? How?

My current mental inage of what you have is a built-in camera on a PC,
with Motion installed on that PC, and you are able to stream cam data
from local host and view it in a browser on the same PC.

Then you went to a different PC, ran a browser and tried to view the
cam data in it. That didn;t work.

>From the sound of it, the second PC is somewhere else completely, i.e.
not on the same network as the PC running Motion, and possibly not even
on the same premises, as it is seems you are going through a NAT
router.

This is where it gets fuzzy. To find out why it doesn't work (assuming
the above mud-map is correct) we would need to know how, networkily
speaking, the second PC is connected to the first.

> I had used Yawcam (Win) to achive the same ends, but as that is
> dependant on Java...

That is interesting. Were you using the same PCs, connected the same
ways? If so, it could well be a firewall problem.

Another possibility is that the streamer is listening for connections
only on the loopback interface (lo). It's common for servers to bind by
default only to the loopback interface for security reasons. You may
need to configure it explicitly to run on the ethernet or wifi
interface of the hosting computer. Check the docs and the config file
for keywords like "bind", "socket" and "listen".

If you know the port that the streamer uses, you can grep for it in the
output from "netstat -an".

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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