FreeNAS, or not?

[R3.]

Hello! I am in the process of designing a network for security on my farm, as there has been a lot of trouble in the last 4 years with poaching, vandalism, sabotage, and violence. I have been lurking on the forum for a while, but have reached the point that I need to ask some questions, any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

The deployment area is nearly 500 acres with over 23,000 feet of perimeter to cover. Terrain is rolling hills, a mixture of fields and wooded, and with buildings, livestock, equipment, etc. to protect. Needless to say, cabling becomes less of an option and I have opted to use multiple smaller networks where camera density needs to be concentrated. These are to be connected to a central location using p2p bridging in a star or spoke configuration. I am starting out slow, testing only a handful of cameras and two bridged connections to begin with. That said, I need to roll out things on a larger basis fairly quickly - as defined by the spare time available to one man working a farm of this size. Here's where I am as far as the central portion of the system goes, and where I probably need the most advice...

I have a desktop system that I can dedicate to Blue Iris. i7-6700, 16Gb in two slots w/ two more open, 2Tb 7200rpm system drive. I have two SATA 3 ports available on the mb, and only 2 pci-e x4 slots to work with. There is limited case space available for drives, and the psu is on the smaller side - in the 400W range, but I don't remember the exact capacity on that right now.

I am considering, due to the amount of storage that I would like to have, running FreeNAS on an old server and connecting it through a dedicated 2nd GbE connection to my desktop as a virtual iSCSI drive. The server would also be responsible for a few lightweight VMs for things like FreeHAB, FreeRadius, MySQL, and OpenSSL. I would love to be running Blue Iris within its own VM on a newer server with Quick Sync capable Xeons, but that's simply not possible in my position.

Would it be a bad idea to run FreeNAS on something as old as an X5660 based system? for the cost of four 8TB Purple drives, i could be running an old Dell R510 with duals, 128GB, redundant supplies, and 12x 3TB 7200 drives. I'd install the system software on thumb drives, and possibly run the disks in sets of four in ZRAID2, then stripe those three sets together. I understand that I could simply map different cameras to single drives, and may still take that approach. Heck, I could mirror them in pairs and still have 18TB available across six separate volumes. Cameras are in the 2 to 4MP range and I am only using units that encode using H264. Time stamping will occur at the camera, and all writes to disk will be direct from the camera feed.

I am only using remote equipment that has a 12VDC power supply possibility, as power will have to be supplied by the sun in many instances and I don't want to have to suffer power conversion losses. But that's another topic, entirely.

I do have a reasonable amount of computer and networking knowledge from a former life, (although not much server based stuff.) All the same, that has been a while and this is a huge project for me. I am cramming on a lot of new material, but would like to get this as close to right as possible the first time.

Any thoughts? Is there a huge bottleneck that I am missing? Any flaws in my logic overall? Other than this is a crazy big project for one person to attempt to pull off on the side while trying to run a farm on his own, lol?

Apologies in advance for the delays that there will be in my responding to this thread that I have nonetheless started. I am not near the computer for very much of the day, and cellular coverage here is sparse, at best.

 

[bp2008]

Hi.

That does sound like a big project, but you also sound very competent so I think you can handle it!!

Here is my advice on the various subjects:

Blue Iris

It is best to run Blue Iris on dedicated hardware, not in a VM. Most applications are fine running in a resource-constrained environment, and simply slow down when they hit a bottleneck. Blue Iris will simply malfunction if the resources it needs are not available in a timely manner.

If you have a lot of cameras, as you may with such a large property, you will probably end up needing to use Blue Iris's "Limit decoding" feature to keep CPU usage under control.

Networking between buildings

You probably already know about them, but Ubiquiti makes great inexpensive radios for long range wireless networking. They can easily achieve over 200 Mbps throughput over your kind of distances, for less than $100 USD per radio. However, clear line of sight is required.

If you find that you need to run a cable between buildings, I encourage using fiber optics. It can be a bit pricey, and it has its own learning curve, but it is very future-proof, and won't create an electrically-conductive path between the network equipment in different buildings.

Off-grid 12v equipment

Ubiquiti radios run on about 10-28 volts (check spec sheets to be sure). They require power to be delivered by passive PoE, but unfortunately most passive PoE injectors accept 120/240v AC power. So you can either cobble together your own network cables or you can use a kit like this one, which puts DC+ on pins 4,5, and DC- on pins 7,8:

http://amzn.com/B01HMNJHII

From that kit, you would only need the injector parts. Plus some DC pigtails to connect to your batteries. And short ethernet patch cables to connect from the "injector" to the radio.

Cameras are a little easier. They almost all can accept 12v power on a standard DC barrel connector (center positive).

If you need a switch, and you probably will at most locations, it can be tricky to find one that takes 12v. A lot of switches take 5v or 9v. The Mikrotik brand is one exception; they typically have a good DC input voltage range and will be fine connected to 12v. Plus they are fairly inexpensive for managed switches.

Storage

I gather that you want to record continuously, given the fairly large storage requirements. RAID is not great for this. If a hard drive dies and you replace it, the RAID needs to rebuild, and that is likely to take days with a heavy continuous recording load still happening.

Honestly what I would do (because it is what I do at my own home) is record to plain HDDs (no RAID), but I run two separate BI servers. One records on motion to relatively small HDDs. The other records continuously to a larger HDD. I run my servers in different rooms, but if you have for example a barn with power, you could run them in entirely different buildings. Given enough bandwidth between buildings of course.

If you really want a RAID, you could set up a pair of RAID 1 arrays (or one RAID 10) on the windows PC that runs Blue Iris. Most decent computer cases and motherboards will support 4 disks just fine, and then you don't need a NAS at all.

Another RAID-like option, instead of FreeNAS, would be unRAID. I think unRAID is better-suited for a video storage server. But you should look it up if you have time and don't know how it works. It operates similarly to a parity-based RAID, but has a number of advantages that I won't go into here.

 

[R3.]

Thanks for the quick and thorough response to my questions! Since I'm not at my destop and am using a tablet, I'm going to reply in multiple posts. I have found that there is, in my case at least, too much of a possibility of screwing up and losing a lot of typing when using a touchscreen, lol.

Yes, I have come to the conclusion that running BI in a VM is a generally bad idea. The thought of connecting to the NAS side of things directly through a VLAN without the worries of network congestion was an appealing point, but I could always just connect from the BI computer to a NAS through a separate network via a second dedicated NIC. I guess that my question can be distilled down to one of economics: As I can buy a used server with lots of drives and total disk space for a price that is roughly equivalent to the cost of adding a far smaller amount of new drive space to my current machine, is there a reason not to run BI on my current capable "workstation" and connect to a NAS through an iSCSI connection? I value your experience, and am open to different ideas as to how it should all be configured. I am just at the point where I need to either order drives, controller, and psu for my current machine - or go with the NAS solution. I have been playing with FreeNAS, but will look harder at unRAID as well. I have had a test server running FreeNAS from USB on an old laptop for a bit, so I'm familiar enough with what it'll take to at least set that up, but if doing storage in this way is going to be substantially counterproductive I'd like to avoid it. Noise, heat, and power issues are all concerns, but of lesser importance to me. Being a farmer, price is a huge factor, but I don't want it to be at the cost of functionality.

 

[R3.]

As far as networking goes, I have looked at running some fiber, and was surprised at how much the cost had dropped since the last time I looked into it. It is still, as you say, expensive - especially for the fiber itself. Still, I will take another look at it.

Yes! I am testing a couple of Ubiquiti's NanoBeam ACs, and so far I love them. Their POE injector, incidentally, is labeled as being 24V output, so I had been thinking of running a 24V, (or possibly some other multiple of 12V,) system and then just tapping off of my storage batteries wherever is needed to get the voltages that are required for the various components involved. Of course, load balancing and battery health are definite concerns. BTW... can you recommend any good IP addressable charge controllers? Ubiquiti looked like they were ramped up to offer some nice units, but it's like they were apparitions.

So far, my test switches have simply been old repurchased DSL routers that have all run from a 12V barrel plug identical to the ones on my cameras. Thanks for the heads up on the Microtik brand. That'll surely save me some unexpected research time. I was expecting the 12V power trend to have continued. Hopefully, I haven't made any more of those kinds of assumptions. They can really come around to bite a person.

 

[R3.]

Yes, continuous recording is my goal. I realize what the rebuild times are like in a RAID environment, as well as the toll that the rebuilding process can take on the remaining drives. That's one plus for the dual parity of a zRAID2 configuration, but the dangers are still there, and real. Running separate machines, especially in different physical locations, sounds like a really good idea! I do have another powered and conveniently located building that I plan to use as one of two major centers for my network. With the right networking throughput, a separate machine in each location could give some solid backup options, too. Of course, here I go running up the cost again...

 

[bp2008]

Old servers are power hogs. And may be loud too. And it may not have much life left in it, and it won't have any kind of warranty. You should factor all of these things into your decision, not just the initial purchase price. Your i7-6700 box, or any used workstation with a single quad core CPU and only 1-2 HDDs be a LOT more efficient and very quiet. Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris

It is certainly possible to record to a NAS. The main concern is reliability. Any hiccups will mean lost video. iSCSI is probably the best way to do do it, if you know how (I don't). Blue Iris does support ordinary network shares (SMB protocol) but it requires a bit of tinkering with the service configuration to get it to log in as a different user.

24v is unnecessary, as the Ubiquiti stuff should all run on 12v just as well. I don't know anything useful about charge controllers. I've never bought one or even wired one up.

 

[bp2008]

If you buy fiber optic equipment, know that you can get old parts from ebay for roughly 10 to 50% of retail. And if you don't go for 10 Gbps (which you don't need anyway), then that also cuts costs a fair amount. The main expense at that point is indeed the fiber optic cable and any conduit, plus your time to run the cable of course. Check out fs.com for pretty good prices on fiber optic cable.

 

[bp2008]

At this point, I wouldn't bother with fiber though unless you simply can't achieve a clear line of sight for radios.

 

[R3.]

Yeah, old servers are definitely power hungry, noisy heaters. And point taken on the possible remaining lifespan. No one wants to lose video at a critical moment. My i7 box isn't under warranty anymore, but it doesn't have a whole lot of hard use on it yet, either.

I hear you on the connectivity hiccups, too. FreeNAS and BI supposedly interface seamlessly via ISCSI, but I have zero firsthand knowledge.

If the Ubiquiti stuff can run directly from 12V, then all the better. And, I agree - fiber would be nice for security, but it's hard to justify with current wireless tech and pricing. I don't have clean lines of sight for all of this. Still I'm hopeful that careful placement and alignment, along with utilizing the lower frequncies, will get me there.

I sure hope so! The main trunk between the two buildings is my next test. It's only .3 or .4 miles away, but it's some interesting terrain.