FTP Watcher to watch for ad hoc activity on the seerver?

[jim]

I've been using Yummy 1.5.1 demo for about a week now and have a few questions apparently not addresses in the user manual. Here's the situation -- I have an IP camera which creates images when an alarm is triggered. Image files are then uploaded to a server. This can occur at any time and image uploads can take place over a period of minutes as the IP camera records the scene. Question - Is it possible to set up FTP Watcher to watch the server folder and transfer image files to a Mac after, say, 5 minutes of the first images being uploaded from the IP camera to the server. This presumes of course that the Mac has an open connection. Hope someone can offer some suggestions. (p.s. it would be nice if Yummy could create a zip file of images files prior to transfer - is this possible?).

[JD]

FTP Watcher is designed to watch a folder on your Mac for activity. It will not work with a folder on the server, I'm afraid, although certainly it's a reasonable feature request That said, it might be worthwhile investigating the use of a Scheduled Synchronization, using the Update Mac setting. You could set it to download new/changed files every five minutes. Obviously this might result in downloading a partially written file from the server, but when the next Sync runs Yummy would see that the file was changed on the server and replace the partial file on your Mac with the fully written one. How does this sound?

I already have an item on my To Do list which would enable Yummy to .zip files before uploading them, but .zipping before downloading is not. Is that what you meant?

[jim]

I don't think using scheduled sync will be practical. Files are only uploaded from the IP camera to the server when an alarm is triggered. This might not happen more than a few times a day, possibly even not for days. I currently receive an email notification of an alarm situation and hence a manual d/l of image files. I suppose I could do a sked sync every hour but this doesn't seem an ideal solution. To answer your question about zip, I want to zip files on the server prior to d/l to the Mac. I don't think Yummy can do this, yet?

[jim]

one other thing...

I'd like to auto delete from the server after d/l. Is this possible?

[JD]

I don't see why the sync would be impractical. It only needs to compare the Mac and Server directories once every hour, for example, and this generates very little traffic if nothing needs to be transferred. The beauty of this solution is that it can all happen automatically, so long as Yummy FTP is running. Ok, it won't be triggered automatically at the instant a new image is available, but it should suffice, even if it does nothing for a few days.

Remote zipping & unzipping is not yet implemented in Yummy FTP, that is correct. However this cannot be achieved via FTP - Yummy FTP will need to log into the server machine as if it were a normal user, via SSH for example, and then issue the required Terminal commands. So if you only have FTP access to your server, this feature will not be available to you.

There is no built-in functionality to delete server files after downloading them. I don't think any other FTP client offers this either. This sounds like a job for an AppleScript - sync every hour then delete all server files. This could be done with Yummy.

[jim]

I'll experiment with sked/sync. Re delete files after d/l, I think you might want to consider this as an option. If no other ftp apps have this it would be another plus for Yummy.

[JD]

Noted

Let me know how you get on with the Scheduled Synchronization idea.

-Jason