buellwinkle

I know some cameras can do in-camera recording to SD card but in a busy ice cream shop, always someone moving around, employees, customers, deliveries, at 5MP, you'll fill that SD card pretty quickly. I would be surprised if you got a full day but you can write to NAS storage.' Another cool camera, probably about the same price as the E96 fisheye is the E97 wide angle. It's 10MP and has a very wide angle lens, about 101 degrees, so you can put it in the corner and get a very detail of the space. Get two in opposite corners and get two perspectives of the place. Should be out in about 2 weeks.

So you are not using Verizon, but a company that uses Verizon's network, but the key is they gave you a static IP which VZW charges $450 for but one time. I do agree that you can't use a router on a router, and the MiFi is one router, the router is the second. I've played around with this for a while and found no easy way, even if you setup one router as the DMZ, not saying it's not possible, but not easy. We do it differently and use a Verizon 4G USB stick in an Cradlepoint Mobile Broadband router specifically made for this purpose. I'm going to assume the EasyN camera is a WiFi camera, just have it connect directly to the MiFi via WiFi and setup port forwarding on the MiFi, forget the router. If the reason for the router is that the camera is attached via Ethernet, then put the router in bridge mode connected to the MiFi WiFi network and attached to your camera.

Wired is the way to go because if you go WiFi, you need an A/C outlet at each camera location, you'll have to hide the wire and easy enough to unplug. So here's my recommendation which is totally outside the box. Get the ACTi E96, its' 5MP so plenty of resolution, put in the middle of the shop on the ceiling, assuming it's all open as most of these shops are. It will basically break down in 4 separate corrected images equaling about a 1MP each so from one camera you can cover the front door, the register, the eating areas. That would cost you about $260, if you want to help with a review I can get it for you cheaper as this is one of those cameras meant for retail and I can't review it effectively at home. Then, for recording, most generic free or cheap solutions aren't all that good and some you don't even recoup your investment because of the time it takes to make them work. ACTi provides very good NVR software and it's light on CPU so you can use an old PC or buy a lower end PC, maybe for $299. You'll also need a PoE injector, about $20-30 to power the camera. Stores are typically easy to wire as they have dropped ceilings. Once that's working and deriving value, you can fill additional areas for additional security, like a camera for the back door, one close-up over the register and one close-up as people enter.

If you are clever with Linux, you can try doing this with a Raspberry PI. Don't now what they cost these days but likely under $50. Have it trigger of a relay and send an URL command to the camera or to Exacq to do something. I know ACTi cameras have a good CGi based API, so you can trigger an HTML event.

I know what your problem is and it's not port forwarding, it's Verizon 4G. The only way I know to make it work is pay their ransom, I believe it's $450 to get a static IP address. Without that, the WAN IP they assign you through DHCP is internal to their network and not the internet, so no path from the internet back to your camera as their firewalls block it. Sucks, I know, been there, don't that, cried for while and then got over it. This is different than 3G where you could have done that, but then limited to 3G speed. This applies to A&T&. Sprint I believe can do it for a small monthly fee. There are clever ways of getting around it, but they are difficult to implement and may not do what you want and suck up a lot of bandwidth, but your account has unlimited data, right?

The trick with surveillance is to have overview cameras that shows what's going on say in a large room. A 3MP camera is more than enough for this and give you good detail. Mount it high to get the details of the event. Then you need close-up cameras at what we call choke points, a place where the subject has to pass through to get in or out. Keep these cameras low, ideally at eye level as you don't want a picture of the top of their heads. Indoors, either get the Hikvision DS-2CD2732F-iS, very nice 3MP varifocal some, runs about $259 or get ACTi D55 3MP indoor domes, about 256 from an authorized dealer. Those are the best bang for the buck for indoor IR domes. Axis does not make a 1080P IR dome, so can't recommend that. With ACTi, you can run their NVR software for free for up to 16 cameras, works very well. You can get an inexpensive PC for about $299 and get you started or repurpose a pc you already have. Very easy to use and easy to export videos for the PO. With Hikvision, you can get their NVR, but I would go with Milestone XProtect Essential, $49/camera for the software but commercial grade software and run it on an inexpensive PC. I would avoid NVR software for the home market that's inexpensive but may not work as you expect. Lastly, you'll need a PoE switch and running 6-8 3MP cameras, I would go with a GiGe PoE switch if you can or at least one with with a GigE uplink. The best bang for the buck may be the Ubiquiti 8 port Tough Switch, GigE, 48V PoE and is a managed switch, runs about $200. If you want to go cheap and your PC has multiple Ethernet ports, get two 4 ports switches, one for each NIC and have 2 subnets.

He wants to take videos he has an analyze them, not analyze on the fly from the camera.

Just find what CPU it is and google it and CPUBenchmark.net has a rating on it, if it's over 2,000 you are good to go with ACTi NVR and say 8 HD cameras. I ran mine with 2GB RAM, 32-bit Windows, no problem.

I believe Black Friday is when retailers get rid of slow moving merchandise or they have 2 of each item at each store and people camp out for 3 days. The only stores I can imagine will have Black Friday deals that sell network cameras are Fry's and MicroCenter, usually Trendnet or D-Link cameras.

It's easier to run SADP, lists all camera regardless of the IP address and you can change it on the fly. Also, if you disconnect the camera, hold the reset button at the same time plug it in for about 16 seconds it should reset it to 192.0.0.64.

Get a cheap PC like a refurb and run the free but very good ACTi NVR 3.0 software. I'm running and old i3-540 and 16 cameras with that software would do fine, so plenty of room for growth. Heck, for say up to 8 cameras, you can get one of those low power Atom or AMD processors.

Are you using a bird house kit. I bought a kit to do this at a condo but camera didn't fit in that well, need a slightly larger birdhouse kit.

How low is low? In a poorly lit apartment, it does pretty well, clear, sharp but can't post someone's living room. Since every situation is different, it's hard to say how it will work, but we can try to simulate it if we can. For example, would one 60W bulb in a room do it, would a 30W bulb do it? I don't have a good test platform for an indoor fisheye. I'd have to find a local business willing to experiment. Any in Chitown or the O.C. willing to try, would be happy to do it.

He said 310-330Mbps, but really, that's sounds like a max'ed out GigE using TCP/IP so real numbers can be higher. If breaking them in to separate NAS devices, at least keep each on it's on NIC and subnet on the server. Still think it's better to take the drives out, SATA or SAS and get a DAS enclosure with a built in RAID controller (SATA or SAS) and use them that way.

The only company I get quick turnaround on is ACTi. Sent them a camera and they fix them the same or next day and ship them out. Sometimes if it's a problem they haven't encountered, it's taken maybe a week. I was not happy with Arecont so I sold mine on eBay a few weeks after I bought it. They did call me back but after I sold it. I had high hopes for a camera manufactured an hour's drive from me. They also have such nice booths at trade shows.

Axxon like PSS is not easy software to setup and get working.

It used to be that if you wanted Dahua cameras, you had to get them in China. But that has changed over the past year with OEM distributors throughout the U.S. and other countries with local support and warranty. As for Alibaba that's geared more towards manufacturers. I personally used Alibaba for years but I'm dealing in quantities of hundreds to thousands. AliExpress is sort of like Amazon or Yahoo for stores owned by resellers that deal in small quantities. Typically you pay with Alipay which takes MasterCard or Visa. As someone that deals with China, consider two things, fast shipping can wipe out most of any cost savings and China Post can take a month to get something, returning stuff that doesn't work to China can be a very slow process and be more expensive to ship back than to receive as China subsidizes shipping to us, but not the other way around.

PSS is not the best choice for recording. Get better software. For free, try Milestone XProtect Go, supports up to 8 cameras, very good free smartphone apps and web client and low CPU use, even with server side motion detect with Dahua. Also, try BlueIris Software trial (if you buy the software it's cheap, $37 on eBay), works pretty well with Dahua cameras but may require a fast processor. Both will have pretty good motion detect algorithms and work way better than PSS.

Check out the ACTi E96, 5MP Fisheye, $260, works pretty well in low light. PM me and I can get some sample pics.

HBA's implies a SAN, not sure it's any faster than a modern day NAS. I've tested EMC's SAN for a join project on/off for a year until the product was ready to take to market and I can tell you that if you really tune a SAN or NAS, maybe you can get it to the point where it's 1/3rd the performance of direct attached disk but I'm talking their low end SAN, $300K range. What we did to mitigate the slowness was to mix internal drives to get the aggregate performance of both.

Yes, the NVR and your router would go on non-PoE ports, the 3 cameras on the PoE ports and you have a little room for expansion. Later if you get a few more cameras, you can get another 8 port switch. One advantage of their 8 port switch vs. their 16 port switch is the 8 port is silent, no fan.

Hopefully at least 10GigE on it's own VLAN. Your best bet is to get DAS (direct attached storage) or hopefully you have enough internal capacity to put say 8 drives in your server, then use the 8 internal drives + 8 on the NAS to get more disk bandwidth. We used to use ratio of 3 NAS or SAN drives to equal performance of 1 internal drive.

RAID 5 is good for reads, but can be slower for writes, especially on large arrays. If you are having performance issues on the drives, you can configure RAID 0 or 10. But you are on the right track reducing the drive counts for RAID 5, personally I would go with 2+1 on RAID 5, much better performance, comparable or maybe even better than RAID 10. Also, split the drive on separate controllers, putting 16 drives on one controller can slow things down.

It's funny because when I did the article on setting this up to write to NAS, people said it didn't work for them and tried various tricks to make it work. I had the Hikvision dome on loan from Hikvision for the article and I plugged it in last week because I wanted to reset it to factory defaults before returning it and I checked and even though it was not plugged in for at least a month, it started recording to my NAS NFS mount and that was with version 5.0 of the firmware and since I believe they came out with 5.0.2 and 5.0.5 but have not loaded the newer firmware. Rumors here say that in firmware version 5.1 they will have broader/better NAS support. I suggested CIFS (Windows mount used by most inexpensive NAS devices) support to their product manager as a more viable solution than NFS so I look forward to seeing what they will do in 5.1.

I've tried Dahua's PSS and was stumped by it and I've run about a dozen different NVR software solutions for myself and reviews I've done. It can be mastered given enough time. You can try a few commercial solutions that may be worth it and most have a trial period to give you a chance to see if it's for you. Some like BlueIris, $37USD on U.S. eBay, simple to use and setup, good if you have just a couple of cameras as it's CPU intensive with 3MP cameras. Has smartphone apps at about $10 extra and a web interface that works with just about any browser, supports Dahua via RTSP. What I settled on personally is Milestone XProtect (free "Go" version or Essential version ($49USD/cam), good web interface that works on just about any browser, very good mobile smartphone apps that are free, supports Dahua via Onvif, finds and sets up Dahua cameras automatically (maybe the only cameras I have it does this with).