Braindead moment with scheduling

[paarlberg]

I need to do the following

I have 5 cams on my front porch and right side of the house

I have 4 other cams facing the rear

I use profile 1 during the day for all cams, but disable BI while I am home. No alerts, just recording on this profile. Don't need to record my smoke breaks and walking the dog in the back yard.

I use profile 2 at night, but only enable it when I go to bed or I am away. Alerts and recording on this profile.

Today we had some woman walk up to the front of the house and I saw her on my desktop, walked to the front door and she was looking through my windows on the front door. She never knocked or rang the door bell. Just looking through the windows appearing to scope the place out. She also had a pair of latex gloves in her hand, it looked like she was about to put them on when I walked to the door. Since there was no recording, I could only get her on video once I got back to my desk.

So... I need to set the 5 cams towards the front to record during the day with the 4 to the rear not record.

I need to be able to easily enable recording all areas should I leave the house. I could override the global schedule, but would prefer to keep the scheduling in one place.

Any thoughts?

 

[nayr]

record 24/7 and deal with watching your self smoke cig's and walk the dog... all those cameras and your going to miss something important.

do you have a home alarm system? can you wire an alarm output to trigger BI to start recording? This is how I am setting my NVR up for indoor cameras, they wont record unless the alarm system is armed and the house is supposed to be vacant.

 

[paarlberg]

We don't have an alarm system, just the cams. Someone is here almost 24x7x365.

I am thinking I could setup a couple more profiles. 1 for front cams and then override the global scheduling. Maybe call them "Front Day" and "Rear Day". Have the front record and the rear not. If we have to leave for some reason, have another profile for "Away Day". Let the night time one stay as is.

There is an option in the camera schedule for override and then use global when it is clear or inactive.



It will create more work, but shouldn't be terrible to setup.

 

[fenderman]

I agree with nayr that you will miss something if you are not always recording at least with motion detection...What you can do is set up duplicate cloned cameras for each cam...on the duplicate just set it for alerts and no recordings...then use the traffic signal to enable/disable the alerts when you are away/home. You can hide these cams so they dont show up on the screen...

 

[nayr]

seems to me like OP is trying to tiptoe around the storage factor of having so many cameras.. not a great idea, add a few more drives to your BI server so you can record as much as you like, as often as you like and still have some sort of useful archive of the last few days... or at least set your frontdoor camera to 24/7 and the more obscure, less vital angles at night or when your away.

much better than trying to predict when something is going to happen and have your cameras running then... my 4 cameras record 24/7 despite motion and there is almost always someone home... 4Tb of storage gives me nearly 2 weeks of everything with nothing missed..

I also dont obsess over my recordings and only go back to review them on occasion where something happens.. so I dont see my self walking the dog or smoking a cig unless I happened to be doing that right before something else I am looking for.. even though the cameras record me and my family outside more than anything else... just this last weekend it was nice to find out which dog to blame for breaking my wife's favorite plant potter.. turns out the dogs were so excited when we got home it was my fault

 

[paarlberg]

My current BI system has 1TB for BI to use. I have 2 other systems that have 16TB (8x 2TB connected to an adaptec 5805 controller) each in them (not being used at the moment), but is a i3 2120 cpu. I don't think it will handle the load of all the cams with BI

Maybe a good option is to get another BI license and put it on the above system. Just let it record to disk 24x7 or use it as a NAS (without BI) for the cams and have them record to it. Use BI for my alerts, and motion recording, etc and everything else go to the NAS.

I have been considering upgrading the mobo in those systems to this http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DRL-EF.cfm and I could easily handle anything BI would need. But the power drain would be a bit much, might have to unplug my Cisco 6509 then .

 

[fenderman]

Why dont you just pop another drive in the bi machine... or set the bi machine to record to the other machine as a network drive

 

[nayr]

putting some of that storage on the network for your existing BI server sounds like a great idea, shouldn't be a problem.. and I bet you have plenty of ports on that 6509 you could bond together to get even better than Gbit performance, even though you wont need it for just recording cams to a NAS.

I am using like ~5MB/s write for recording 24/7, If I recorded to a NAS it could be using USB2 drives and 100Mbit ethernet and still have plenty of overhead.

 

[nayr]

toss freenas on one or both of those two large fileservers not being used at the moment; sounds like thats what the'd be great at.

Ive got something for my redundant storage array, except both servers are striped arrays for insane speeds and then mirror eachother over a 40Gbps fiber channel card.. toss a load balancer infront of em and they are friggin ridiculously fast as both servers speed is then combined... not that you'd need that kinda performance

 

[paarlberg]

My goal is to move BI off my main desktop. I held off moving it knowing I would be getting these beefier servers for free. That is why I started this topic. It got a little off-topic quickly.:sad2:

 

[nayr]

can BI record your cams Direct2Disk? If your doing 24/7 with no motion Direct2Disk your i3 system might be able to hang as its basically just saving 8 video streams to file and giving you a nice UI for managing/playing the recordings and cameras. Worth a shot, as long as its not dropping frames it may still be okay even under high loads.

I believe its just the motion detection and transcoding features of BI that require serious horsepower behind them... you can use those perhaps in future after some upgrades.

 

[fenderman]

it depends on you motion settings...when we refer to BI's direct to disk feature, the image can still be analyzed for motion, and depending on the settings can be resource intensive...i never tested direct to disk with no motion, just 24/7 record...

 

[paarlberg]

I will see if I can get it rack mounted this weekend and do some testing on it.

 

[paarlberg]

That beast sucks about 2A on 110v. Some of the fans were doing almost 7k rpm, turned it down to optimal instead of full speed and it helped with the noise, still pulling the same amps.. that was at idle as well.

There are 9 drives in the chassis, 1 for OS and 8 for the array.

 

[nayr]

yeah i doubt your gonna get it down much; but hey they were free servers.. your talking a few decades before you pay for em in electricity

 

[paarlberg]

I have quite a few 4-drive versions of the server, they use about 50% of the power. That makes sense since the number of drives dropped.