Hello from Central Illinois

[Wetherell33]

Hi all,

I’m learning as I go but I’m setting up a 6 camera system. I’ve got 6 reolink rlc 420-5MP POE cameras running on my home built PC running BIv5. I’ve gotten a lot of advice from reading posts here and I’m looking forward to further learning to tweak my knowledge of streaming and networking.

Steven

 

[crw030]

Now get them installed and share your install pictures !

 

[Wetherell33]

I should have time this weekend to get them routed. I'm in a ranch style house so should be pretty straight forward. Planning for soffit attachment then running all 6 of the camera feeds to a rack mount 24 port Cisco POE switch that I picked up for $20 on Facebook in the attic.

I have a question for the gurus here though (forgive my newb status).....currently I have a netgear modem with 2 ethernet ports. port 1 is going to my nighthawk WiFi router and port 2 I have running to the basement to a switch with a hardline to my Xbox and another to my Blue Iris PC (all gigabit). Is there any downside to running the POE switch (100Mbps) from the attic into the gigabit switch? That is how I have it configured now in the basement as a trial. I still need to work though getting it setup on a VPN for remote access because I can only get that figured out with the port forwarding through the remote access wizard tool and I've read that is not good for security reasons.

 

[crw030]

If you mean running: Modem (port 2) -----> basement Switch (1gig) -----> POE switch (100mb) ------>cameras ?
or even: Modem (port 2) -----> basement Switch (1gig) -----> Blue Iris PC ------> POE switch (100mb) ------>cameras ?

Should work fine that's kind of how I am setup.

 

[Wetherell33]

This is my setup. I'd like to be able to eventually get the IoT integrated to turn on a light / outlet upon camera trigger. I'm not there yet, but wondering if I need to configure the modem to be able to see the router? or is it just as easy to put the router in before the basement switch and everything should be connected? I had troubles initially when trying to setup the remote access because I created static IP's for the cameras when the basement switch was hooked to the router, then I moved to setup below and had to reset the IP addresses accordingly. Like I said, network newb here so welcome any and all advice.

Modem: Netgear N300 (model C3000) WiFi has been disabled
Router: Netgear Nighthawk X6S (model R7900P)

 

[Hammerhead786]

Welcome to the forum. I'd be tempted to move the BI pc to the POE switch and have it on a separate vlan to the cameras. This will isolate the cameras from your home network and you can also setup an access list to prevent traffic from the camera going anywhere other than to the BI pc.

 

[Wetherell33]

Welcome to the forum. I'd be tempted to move the BI pc to the POE switch and have it on a separate vlan to the cameras. This will isolate the cameras from your home network and you can also setup an access list to prevent traffic from the camera going anywhere other than to the BI pc.

Is this possible while still letting the BI PC see the rest of the network? It’s not a fully dedicated pc so it’s used for general internet browsing, word processing, etc

any good links / threads on this topic?

 

[crw030]

Does your basement switch, POE switch or Modem/Router support VLAN's ? If none do then I think then some crafty cameras might be able to "call home" with the proposed configuration.

 

[Hammerhead786]

Is this possible while still letting the BI PC see the rest of the network? It’s not a fully dedicated pc so it’s used for general internet browsing, word processing, etc

any good links / threads on this topic?

Yes it's possible, you just need to set up some static route(s) in the router. You really want BI to be on a dedicated pc though. If you're willing to learn, we can help you get there. If you look at the attached document, this is my setup.

 

[Wetherell33]

Yes it's possible, you just need to set up some static route(s) in the router. You really want BI to be on a dedicated pc though. If you're willing to learn, we can help you get there. If you look at the attached document, this is my setup.

That is a good visual and thorough explanation, thanks. My POE switch is a Cisco Catalyst 3560 which looks like it is capable of VLAN setup. I believe the router is also capable. I've definitely got a lot more reading to do before I figure that out.

Currently I don't have the budget for a separate BI dedicated PC or too much more hardware at the moment. Thoughts on best way to isolate the cameras from the internet? I've turned off port forwarding and won't be remote accessing until I can read more and figure out a secure VPN and fully understand that first. I'm fine to be able to have the iPad connect when I'm at home on the WiFi only for now.

 

[Hammerhead786]

That is a good visual and thorough explanation, thanks. My POE switch is a Cisco Catalyst 3560 which looks like it is capable of VLAN setup. I believe the router is also capable. I've definitely got a lot more reading to do before I figure that out.

Currently I don't have the budget for a separate BI dedicated PC or too much more hardware at the moment. Thoughts on best way to isolate the cameras from the internet? I've turned off port forwarding and won't be remote accessing until I can read more and figure out a secure VPN and fully understand that first. I'm fine to be able to have the iPad connect when I'm at home on the WiFi only for now.

The 3560 also appears to be able to do layer 3 routing (inter-vlan routing). As long as the BI pc is on a separate vlan to that of the cameras, only allow the camera vlan to communicate with the BI pc. If you look at my setup, you would only have 2 vlans instead of the 3 that I have. If you want to forego the vlans altogether, then you would use the dual nic method. Hope this makes sense.

 

[Wetherell33]

Had to fight weather this weekend but got 5 of the 6 cameras up and running. Here are some install pictures, which was pretty straight forward. Need to tidy up the wires in the attic and figure out the location for the last one.

I’m recording 5 of the reolink rlc-420 configured at 15 FPS direct to disk on a 2 TB surveillance drive. Running a core i7-3770 CPU and 16GB of DDR3 RAM and I’m around 20% loading right now.

All in all I’m pretty happy and just need to tweak setting for triggering. Thinking about setting up a night profile and an away profile with different notifications. Also thinking about setting up zones for triggering to minimize false positive triggers with wind / rain / snow etc.

Does anyone have experience with triggering IoT with Blue Iris?