Blue Iris Over VPN

[Mad_Scientist]

Hey folks.

We are looking at putting security cameras on a new property. our company has an under utilized server on site currently, and plenty of bandwidth. We are likely going to set the new location up on a permanent VPN with the current location. What I would like to do, is send the camera streams (h265 compressed) to our local server. Im sure this will work, technically speaking, but I am wondering if any of you have any experience with VPNs and how "good" they are in regards to stable connections and how it might work if the connection between the two locations drops temporarily. (power surge for instance) Both systems would have sufficient battery backup.

 

[crw030]

For about two years I have had an OpenVPN connection running between my house in Colorado (Fiber internet) and a remote house in Illinois (Comcast internet, more recently a 10/3 fiber connection). The remote location is just a plain old 10-year old ASUS router which allows inbound connections (runs as server), and this location opens a client connection and if it goes down auto-reconnects.

Occasionally it goes down or the uplink gets a little behind on the 10/3 connection and I lose some frames and I have to stream at a silly 2-3 FPS until I setup a remote BI instance to record higher framerate locally. But the main pain points (for me) was consumer connections have somewhat unreliable bandwidth guarantees (especially UPLOAD is what you will need at the remote site), and data caps (you can easily surpass 1000GB/month streaming 24x7).

Reliability is pretty decent, just when power goes out I lose connection, when the internet provider changes something I lose connection, and when I tweak a setting in the ASUS over VPN and break the OpenVPN connection its stays broke until I can get a tech onsite, so once setup leave it the F* alone if it is 1000 miles away!

 

[Mad_Scientist]

For about two years I have had an OpenVPN connection running between my house in Colorado (Fiber internet) and a remote house in Illinois (Comcast internet, more recently a 10/3 fiber connection). The remote location is just a plain old 10-year old ASUS router which allows inbound connections (runs as server), and this location opens a client connection and if it goes down auto-reconnects.

Occasionally it goes down or the uplink gets a little behind on the 10/3 connection and I lose some frames and I have to stream at a silly 2-3 FPS until I setup a remote BI instance to record higher framerate locally. But the main pain points (for me) was consumer connections have somewhat unreliable bandwidth guarantees (especially UPLOAD is what you will need at the remote site), and data caps (you can easily surpass 1000GB/month streaming 24x7).

Reliability is pretty decent, just when power goes out I lose connection, when the internet provider changes something I lose connection, and when I tweak a setting in the ASUS over VPN and break the OpenVPN connection its stays broke until I can get a tech onsite, so once setup leave it the F* alone if it is 1000 miles away!

THanks for your input!! fortunately this new facility is less than 10 miles away. We have local telco here that does internet, but so far (i have been here 3 years) they have provided impeccable service. They are fiber, and the hardware on each end (including the fiber lines/ONT's etc) are all battery backup. so it will keep running, even in total power outage situation, for about an hour. that happens a few times a year, but if it reconnects at startup we should be fine there. Im thinking we will have 100-150mbps worth of camera feeds on our gigabit connection, so im also looking for VPN hardware that can handle the encryption at those rates.

 

[JNDATHP]

For networking hardware I would suggest UniFi by Ubiquity. Very robust and has VPN built in so to speak.

We have been running a VPN from our iPhones to a USG router, also UniFi, since about February and have had no problems.

 

[vulpes]

You should check the hardware requirements for 100mbps VPN. I'm not so sure an ordinary router can cut it.

For the last couple of years, I've had an OpenVPN server running on a Raspberry pi(v1!) at a summer house on a 4G link, 6GB monthly limit. It served its purpose, allowing me to download daily snapshots(who was that man in the red boat Dec 18 1.21pm?), and get videos of animals passing by during winter.

This year we finally were able to get a 1000GB plan(200 was previously max and after 40GB it is 3mb/s), so it was time for an upgrade. I installed OpenVPN access server in a VM at home, and have an OpenVPN client on a pi3 connecting in a site-to-site configuration. On the pi, there's a script that checks every 5 min for the VPN tunnel. If it's down, it reconnects.

Now I'm constantly streaming 3 cameras in "low" resolution to Blue Iris, and I was able to cancel the satellite TV subscription, as I stream my home channels in glorious SD. All in all, I think it's cheaper than the old solution, since I now only pay for one cell subscription, instead of three services.