What a great resource!

[Rick daVida]

Hello All
First post from 'down-under', although I've been lurking / reading for a while now.

After much reading - Cliff Notes are an absolute gem - I've just received 4 cameras and a PoE switch from Andy and the cable guy will be along in a few days to put it together.

I'm using Blue Iris on a second-hand HP i5 6700, 8 GiB of RAM from e bay.

I replaced the main drive with an SSD and will run a WD 4 TiB BLUE drive for data until I can afford a bigger WD PURPLE.

Thanks to Andy from EmpireTech for help, support and very quick delivery, and also thanks to giomania for sharing his very detailed openVPN document.

Todays task is to work out how to create a closed wi fi home network so we can monitor BI on phones / tablets etc.

This will be the challenging bit - I'm useless with networks.
Rick

 

[gwminor48]

Welcome Rick, thanks for the introductory post.

 

[adamdylan]

Hi Rick
What cameras did you buy?
Ive read 4tb will do say 7 cameras for 2 weeks of recording and if you set the recording to motion detection on some cams it will increase recording time significantly
(Camera /motion/ and my settings are almost max on obj and sensitivity)

 

[Rick daVida]

Hi Rick
What cameras did you buy?
Ive read 4tb will do say 7 cameras for 2 weeks of recording and if you set the recording to motion detection on some cams it will increase recording time significantly
(Camera /motion/ and my settings are almost max on obj and sensitivity)

Hi Mate.
From Andy, I got an 8 port PoE, 1 x IPC-HDW2231R-ZS (EyeBall), 1 x IPC-HDBW4231F-AS (mini Dome), 1 x IPC-HDBW4231E-ASE (mini Dome) and 1 x SD22404T-GN.

The IPC-HDW2231R-ZS has the best picture of them all !! The SD22404T has a large issue with condensation and heat, but I'm sure that will get sorted.

I started with an i5-6500 CPU, getting 40% load with remote viewing. Then I discovered I had an i7-6400 lying around which made a huge difference to the CPU load, now down to low 20% on heavy load.

I'm still playing with storage allocation settings and recording times. My plan is to upgrade to the WD Purple when I have the funds.

Blue Iris is rock solid and the level of support here at IPCT is spectacular and much appreciated.

I've just about got VPN sorted on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ which in my setup is the easiest and most efficient way to do this.
Rick