Lobotomy for the D-Link DCS-900

Trying to work with a Webcam in Linux is a head banging experience. But after reading this article, I found out that with the D-Link DCS-900, there is quite a bit of stuff you can do from the IP side of things. Check it out:

The D-Link DCS-900 is billed as a Fast Ethernet Internet Camera. With street prices  www.streetprices.com) in the $77-$110 range it sounded like it had potential. So, I bought one to play with.

I would like to say that you plug it in and it does everything you want but it is more like you plug it in, point a Java-enabled browser at it and it does more than you want. Thus, it took a bit of creativity to make it as dumb as I wanted.

How dumb? Real dumb. I wanted to be able to tell the camera I wanted an image, grab the image and do stuff with it. Having a Java-enabled web page that combined D-Link advertising with up to four camera images was cute but, again, not what I want. The good news is that you can make it that dumb.

The first trick is to figure out its IP address and set it to something sane. If you look in the PDF manual on the CD then you can find the answer but let me save you the trouble. It lives at 192.168.0.20. Assuming that 192.168.0.0 is not your default network, you will need to convince your system to talk to the camera directly. If your system talks to everyone else (including where you plugged in the camera) on eth0, the following command will do what you need.