Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
I used to use ZoneMinder, but found that it needed a lot of babysitting. Cameras which disconnected, usually due to wifi interference, sometimes wouldn’t start working again when they came back on the network. The version I was on also struggled with larger image sizes, though that’s most likely due to a lack of memory.<p>I’ve since switched to a dedicated machine running Blue Iris. It works a lot better for me than ZoneMinder did.<p>Network-wise, cameras get segregated onto their own VLAN and they aren’t allowed to initiate connections to anywhere. The Blue Iris machine is the only machine allowed to initiate connections into the camera VLAN.<p>I use Node-RED and PushOver to deliver motion detection notifications from the outdoor cameras. They get run through AWS Rekognition first to filter out things I’m not interested in (e.g., don’t tell me about neighbourhood cats at the door, but do tell me about humans at the door).<p>Remote access is via a VPN. Connect on demand makes remote access as seamless as local access.<p>Instead of trying to get a camera with the appropriate API and features, I recommend using “dumb” cameras and having all of the smarts on the NVR side. The big advantage of this is that you can upgrade the smarts of the system without replacing the cameras. Central management of alerts, recordings, etc is also very worthwhile.