About NEPA309.COM

the cameras from the back end

The concept for nepa309.com began germinating in my brain back in 2005. It was a snowy winter night, and I was working in Plains, PA. I very vividly remember looking up at the sky and thinking, Wow... I wonder what Mountain Top is like right now. I wonder how the roads are. I wonder if they've shut down Route 309 because of the snow. I wish I could just get a glimpse of the highway from my kitchen window right now...   When I got back to my desk, I searched out webcams on Route 309 using Google, but the nearest camera I could find was in Philadelphia. It wasn't very helpful.   Six months or so later, I was laid off from that job, with oodles of time on my hands. I began the project that eventually built damnage networks. I picked up on a couple of refurbished Compaq Deskpro EN's from TigerDirect, and began tinkering with Linux in the form (or flavor, if you prefer) of Fedora. After a lot of trial and error, I finally got it right, and the network came alive.   I puttered around with it for a year or so, messing with different scripts and ideas using damnage.com, a domain I've owned since 1999.

Web-wise, this all started on damnage.com using Windows 2000 and a free webcam server called Webcam 2000. There were two cheap webcams mounted in my kitchen window, one with a day time view, the other for night time images. The server produced still images only, but it was a workable solution. The machine ran through a wireless connection, and given what Windows 2000 is, could get finicky when it came to reliable up time. I bought the domain name and integrated it into the network's scheme of things, and I ran it for a year or so like this, then pretty much gave up on maintaining it properly.

damnage networks from the outside