Home Security System?

[Memories4K]

Anyone have experience with putting cameras around their house?

Can you give me some recommendations or help? 

New to this.

Please and Thank you!

[MrMarriarty]

baseball bats are way cheaper lol

 

Are you looking wired or wireless?

[ARikozuM]

Can't help just yet, but I've been looking into ZoneMinder with a couple of PoE cameras. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

IMO, the best solution is PoE IP Cameras with a PoE switch and a NAS. That way you don't have to worry about plugging in power cables, you just route all the ethernet cables to the PoE switch and they're powered fine and networked in. Create a share on the NAS and then configure each camera to write to that share. Depending on the camera, you may be able to give it a quota to start overwriting old files once it's used a certain amount of space and such. 

 

I've set this up at a garage I have nearby but haven't gone about setting it up at the house just yet, though I do have it planned out. 

 

Synology has CCTV software available for its NAS systems that allows you to set up, manage and view cameras through the NAS. I believe it can accommodate 2 cameras out of the box, but over that, you need to purchase licenses to add more cameras. If you're doing a large system with lots of cameras, you'll likely be better off with a system somewhere running a Linux distro with a IP CCTV software installed. You should be able to do this in FreeNAS and unRAID as well. You may also want to consider having a dedicated part of the network for the IP cameras and then link it in to the existing network so you can still access it. That way the traffic for the CCTV network doesn't impact the rest of the network as it should keep to itself. 

 

If you want to keep the CCTV stuff separated a bit, you'd probably want to look into getting a managed switch and putting it in a VLAN with a system you want to monitor it on on the same VLAN. 

 

EDIT: There are also wireless IP cameras, but I'd really advise against that. Wireless tech is inherently more vulnerable to outside attacks, so I'd stick to wired for a security system, it's safer and more reliable. 

[Memories4K]

6 minutes ago, MrMarriarty said:

baseball bats are way cheaper lol

 

Are you looking wired or wireless?

Either.
Wireless would be cool but i don't mind the work of hiding a cable around the molding of doorways and such.
Hahaha a baseball bat would be cheaper but there's also the idea of wanting to "protect" my home even when i'm not there.
 

 

7 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Can't help just yet, but I've been looking into ZoneMinder with a couple of PoE cameras. 

I'll check it out; yeah i was hoping to use open-source software to keep track of stuff, I haven't seen anything proprietary that i feel i'd need/want.
 

 

8 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

IMO, the best solution is PoE IP Cameras with a PoE switch and a NAS. That way you don't have to worry about plugging in power cables, you just route all the ethernet cables to the PoE switch and they're powered fine and networked in. Create a share on the NAS and then configure each camera to write to that share. Depending on the camera, you may be able to give it a quota to start overwriting old files once it's used a certain amount of space and such. 

 

I've set this up at a garage I have nearby but haven't gone about setting it up at the house just yet, though I do have it planned out. 

 

Synology has CCTV software available for its NAS systems that allows you to set up, manage and view cameras through the NAS. I believe it can accommodate 2 cameras out of the box, but over that, you need to purchase licenses to add more cameras. If you're doing a large system with lots of cameras, you'll likely be better off with a system somewhere running a Linux distro with a IP CCTV software installed. You should be able to do this in FreeNAS and unRAID as well. You may also want to consider having a dedicated part of the network for the IP cameras and then link it in to the existing network so you can still access it. That way the traffic for the CCTV network doesn't impact the rest of the network as it should keep to itself. 

 

If you want to keep the CCTV stuff separated a bit, you'd probably want to look into getting a managed switch and putting it in a VLAN with a system you want to monitor it on on the same VLAN. 

I'm completely beginner at this home security thing, i had no idea there were PoE cameras until today; it seems to make things much more convenient.

NAS for sure, i was expecting i'd have to build a NAS for this.

Yeah it'll be around 4+ cameras so i'm probably going the Linux route.

Oh man, i wouldn't know how to go about creating a dedicated part of a network for the cameras and then linking it back in. Is there a tutorial you could recommend?

Thank you very much guys!

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Memories4K said:

I'm completely beginner at this home security thing, i had no idea there were PoE cameras until today; it seems to make things much more convenient.

NAS for sure, i was expecting i'd have to build a NAS for this.

Yeah it'll be around 4+ cameras so i'm probably going the Linux route.

Oh man, i wouldn't know how to go about creating a dedicated part of a network for the cameras and then linking it back in. Is there a tutorial you could recommend?

Thank you very much guys!

Easiest way to set up the network is basically to build the camera system as if it's on a new network, so have a switch for the cameras and the NAS, then just connect that switch to your existing network and you're done.The cameras will just send all their data over the new switch to the NAS, so the traffic won't impact your existing network. The only time traffic will come over to the existing part of the network is when you're viewing the cameras by accessing the system that's running the CCTV software. 

 

As for VLANs, you'd basically connect everything to a single managed switch, set the cameras and NAS to VLAN 1 and then everything else to VLAN 2. Any systems you want to be able to access the cameras and NAS (you'll want at least one really) you set to VLAN 1 and 2 so it can also access the "main" network. If you're not fussed about which systems in your network can access it, go for the setup from before. 

 

Also, there's a fairly good bandwidth calculator here if you want to work out how much bandwidth you'd need. If you have 4x 720P cameras recording 24/7 at 20FPS, you should only need slightly over 10Mbps bandwidth for all of them combined, so keeping them separate from the rest of the network may not be an issue if you're not a heavy bandwidth user. That setup would take about 18 days of continuous recording before it would fill up a 2TB drive. I'd advise having it set to overwrite old footage at that point. I personally have a single 2TB WD Purple in the system at the garage with 2x 1080p cameras recording at 20FPS. That takes about 2 weeks before it starts overwriting. 

 

With the system at home, I plan on having about 4-5 1080p cameras at 20FPS using 2x 4TB WD Purple drives in RAID 1. I've been looking into the best way to setup the system that will manage storage and the CCTV software. I initially planned on having my existing NAS run it, but I'd rather keep it from extra traffic (if only 10Gbps was affordable) so I'm now thinking a system with an i3 running Ubuntu may be the best solution. I'd just run something like Zoneminder and have a share setup on that system for the cameras to dump to. I'd kind of like to have dedicated systems set up in various rooms to view the cameras from, but at that point I'd just be spending more money for the sake of it.