News items for tag webcam - Koos van den Hout

I was looking at the overview of most requested but not available URLs and noticed there is still traffic to http://webcam.idefix.net/. For years that was the webcam site when I still had access to a reasonable location for putting up a webcam. First a good view at my previous house, and later a window with a good view from a server room at work.

So I dug up the archived images and scripts, cleaned them up and made them available again. There are no fresh images, just the aged archives.

Time to count IPv6 visitor percentage to different websites again:

Site	July 2009	July 2010	July 2011	July 2012	July 2014
http://idefix.net/ my homepage	1%	2%	2%	3%	4%
http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep	2%	2%	2%	3%	1%
http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps	< 1%	5%	6%	7%	6%
http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files		1%	1%	1%	3%
http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam	< 1%	1%	< 1%	2%	2%
http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase	< 1%	1%	1%	4%	87%
http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless	< 1%	1%	1%	3%	70%
http://weatherstation.idefix.net/ Weather station Utrecht Overvecht					1%

Interesting numbers. Results for The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless are totally skewed thanks to some IPv6 bot constantly checking the site from constantly changing IPv6 addresses .. but without privacy extensions enabled.

Method: unique IPv6 addresses seen in the whole month / total unique addresses seen in the whole month.

At the moment my webcam at http://webcam.idefix.net/ shows no new images: there is no outside camera location available.

The webcam image at webcam.idefix.net is getting popular at the moment due to the use by nedWeer.nl peaking at 0.5 requests/second.

Since the image is imported from a different server in a proxying setup this was causing quite some traffic on my adsl line. The image doesn't update every second, so I had a look into caching possibilities with apache 2.2. I wanted to use the memory cache for just this one object but I started with the disk cache because it's easier to debug and see the files on disk. This didn't work, and I could not figure out why. I followed the instructions found in apache2 - Apache Reverse Caching Proxy - why isn't it caching? - stackoverflow.com but still no caching happening.

I set up a separate virtual server with the logging set to level 'debug' and found the following interesting line in the log:

[Thu Feb 06 16:24:59 2014] [debug] mod_cache.c(370): (12)Cannot allocate memory: cache: Cache provider's store_body failed!

This looked more like a memory cache problem than a disk cache problem. But the memory cache wasn't configured at all. I decided to remove the memory cache support completely and that fixed things with the disk cache. The debug log suddenly had the right messages:

[Thu Feb 06 16:25:59 2014] [debug] mod_cache.c(633): cache: Caching url: /camwindow.jpg

Now the webcam image is cached for 120 seconds. Which saves some traffic on the ADSL line.

Update 2013-02-10: Requests still going at about 0.5 requests/second at busier times. The proxy reduces the impact on ADSL traffic and ping delays.

Time to count IPv6 visitor percentage to different websites again:

Site	July 2009	July 2010	July 2011	July 2012
http://idefix.net/ my homepage	1%	2%	2%	3%
http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps	< 1%	5%	6%	7%
http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep	2%	2%	2%	3%
http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files		1%	1%	1%
http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam	< 1%	1%	< 1%	2%
http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase	< 1%	1%	1%	4%
http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless	< 1%	1%	1%	3%

Interesting numbers. Websites with a more 'general' audience are now also growing this year.

Method: unique IPv6 addresses seen in the whole month / total unique addresses seen in the whole month.

Fresh cloudy skies on http://webcam.idefix.net/. It's back, someone was kind enough to lend me some room in his window giving a nice view in a north-easterly direction.

Redoing the IPv6 percentages visitors websites for November 2010:

• http://pictures.idefix.net/ pictures : 7%
• http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps : 4%
• http://idefix.net/ my homepage : 4%
• http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep : 2%
• http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files : <1%
• http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam : <1%
• http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase : <1%
• http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless : <1%

There is an interesting relation between 'website with technical subject' and 'visitors with IPv6'. I counted the number of unique addresses of visitors via IPv6 to several websites I run for the month of July 2010 and found the following percentages:

• http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps : 5% (1%)
• http://pictures.idefix.net/ pictures : 4% (2%)
• http://idefix.net/ my homepage : 2% (1%)
• http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep : 2% (2%)
• http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files : 1%
• http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam : <1%
• http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase : < 1%
• http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless : < 1%

Comparing it to July 2009 (percentages between parentheses) does show growth.

Interesting weather this morning: snow started between 7 and 8, and it was nearly melted away again before 11. Overview on webcam.idefix.net Uithof archive Monday 8 March 2010.

I just noticed something: the archive of webcam.idefix.net in the Uithof in Utrecht now covers a longer period (now 3 years and approximately 3 months) than the archive of webcam.idefix.net at the Beneluxlaan in Utrecht (which stopped just a bit over 2 years). How time flies.