I have a network at my house, and one at my barn. The barn network is bridged to the network at the house and hooks through a repeater to my house router. The router at the barn has 5 IP video cameras hooked to it.

I use Firefox to view the feeds from the cameras. Sometimes when I link to them they come right up other times it takes almost a minute to hook up. I almost seems like the connection from house to barn shuts down and has to be re-initialized before connecting. I'm wondering if there is a way to automatically ping the barn router every so often to keep the connection active. I'm not sure how often it would have to be done, once every 5 minutes maybe?

Any insight/thoughts/advice would be appreciated.

I assume the cameras aren't wireless?

wireless video cameras (not wifi, their own wireless) are toxic to wifi

They are hardwired to the router at the barn. I noticed even before the cameras were installed that the connection to up there was slow at times. once established it works well, but when you don't use it for a while then it again takes a while to establish a connection.


Why? because of the bandwidth?

because they use the same area of spectrum

and the cameras spray the band like a firehose, usually knocking out every wifi channel in earshot.

Looks like you missed this part......I believe he said they were not wireless.

I'm guessing there's another cause for his signal attenuation....possibly resolved with a pair of high-gain directional antennae for his WiFi link to the barn.

I have an engenius client bridge that is supposed to have a range of up to 25-30km. I'm only looking at 300 feet or so.

Is there software available that I can set up to ping the barn router on a scheduled time interval? I'm thinking that might keep the connection active.

cron

If I knew Linux, or someone who did. I'll bet it's a simple script. Guess I need Linux for Dummies.

automator script then?

strangely enough, I find automator complicated and somewhat baffling, but have no problems at all in the command line...

applescript has always been one of those 'works great if you can figure out how to get it to do what you want' kind of languages. Figuring out the syntax it wants in a given specific situation can be extremely frustrating.

I know I'm jumping in a little late, but there are apps that wrap Cron in a GUI for those of us who are command line challenged. I'd search Macupdates for cron.

Also worth noting, cron has been depreciated in 10.6 and users are encouraged to use launchd instead. I also find that the mechanism that sends text output from cronjobs via sendmail does not function in 10.6.

(which led to my developing a rather scary Expect script to send using gmail, let me know if you need it)

*blink*

How does one create a Unix-derived operating system that deprecates cron? That's like deprecating ls or man or sendmail.

well I did mention that sendmail doesn't work anymore too

Same way a Unix system deprecates vi in favor of vim, or rsh in favor of ssh. When you have a superior tool available, discourage use of the old inferior tool.

OK, vi and rsh are still there, and haven't been officially deprecated (although rsh should be), but files like /etc/passwd or /etc/rc are either gone or only a shadow of their former selves. Even Unix sometimes lets go of the past.