Hello, I’m wondering what the consensus is (if there is one) on the best hardware and software (open source very much preferred, runs in Docker is a must) to use for privacy-respecting, self-hosted security cameras. I have always wanted to avoid feeding the surveillance state and have never had a security camera but unfortunately I recently saw evidence of someone trying to break into my home. I searched Lemmy for posts on this topic and only found one from two years ago: https://lemmy.world/post/12726787. I assume things are a bit different now so I’m basically making the same post again as OP. Thanks in advance for any tips anyone may have for me.
PS. My experience level is that I currently run several self-hosted solutions via Docker and have been doing so for a few years. I am not a networking guru but I do understand the basics, and I’ve setup pihole in the past (but deactivated it due to some false-positive issues). If there’s a reason to stand that back up in order to prevent otherwise private cameras from “phoning home”, I can do that.
I use Reolink cameras and recently got a Reolink NVR. I do block all Reolink devices from the internet in my OpenWRT firewall. I didn’t want to host a NVR on my server that’s already hosting a bunch of other stuff and further increase the blast radius of my server as a single point of failure. Reolink is all proprietary, but at least it’s local and works without internet access.
YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!
If you have the time to set it up, learn the different use cases of cameras and monitor it for failure somehow then frigate is good.
If you’re using ip cameras you 100% no foolin without question have to put them on a vlan at the very least. They are an insane liability when it comes to network security.
If I had it all to do over again I’d have done power over ethernet, put them all on their own switch that does poe injection and done vlan by the one phy going from the poe switch to the router.
People will fight me about this, but ip cameras are all pretty much the same. They make available some video stream at a preset bitrate and resolution, use built in infrared or visible lighting and offer pan, tilt and zoom (ptz) controls to authorized users. Some have motion detection and object recognition on device which may or may not be surfaced to the camera server.
I always offload object detection and classification to the server even if the camera has it on board because even on cpu image inference is “okay” and with an old gt750 nvidia card you can do much faster object detection and classification. The reason for doing it all on server is in order to get consistent results.
If you are a computer savvy person: congratulations, you picked a project that uses memory, gpu and disk space at a time when they’re all at a premium! Hell yeah!
YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!
Fortunately you don’t need ddr5 for this so any old server is fine. Scale your ram needs up or down depending on the cameras you’re looking for.
Consider buying one of those ten year old servers with redundant power supplies. Even if they’re both connected to the same ups (and you need the camera server on it’s own ups) you can keep going when one dies.
There are two minds regarding disks in surveillance servers. The first is “fuck it, kill the disks, who cares, they’re a wear part!” The second is “no, careful management of our disks will ensure trouble free use for years to come.” I’m of the second variety and run a zpool of small (<2tb) disks with an optane cache. The cache saves the disks from some of the drive killing random writes and reads and lets me keep running at speed when reviewing things.
When you go to put in an old gpu, make sure the plastic cowling shaped like an anime titty isn’t too big otherwise the pcie standard sized spaces in most servers won’t be able to take it.
YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!
I have been robbed and had to hand camera data over to the cops and can offer you some more practical advice if you’re open to it.
Super simple to setup with docker. Works with any camera that broadcasts rtsp streams.
I have it running with 3 Sonoff cams and it works great, and sends alerts through NTFY for self-hosted notifications.
3 Sonoff cams
Nice, these https://sonoff.tech/en-eu/collections/security-cameras ? No HomeAssistant integration? Do they require any application from Sonoff or does LightNVR handles everything once connected to LAN?
I have the B1P cams. There’s an app that you need to use to set them up on your wifi, of course. And the app will give you the rtsp address to plug into lightnvr. You can also use that address in Hass to add the streams to your dashboard. There’s no integration that I’m aware of. There’s no need to use the sonoff app afterwards, unless you need to change wifi networks or upgrade the firmware.
thanks, which app though? Is it open source too?
Im trying to buy hardware that requires no proprietary app at all, even for setup, only relying on well documented protocols.
eWeLink. It’s not open source, it’s the sonoff official app.
