SRC666

I have the core of my system set up, but I need to install a couple of external cameras on the vinyl siding. I'm good with interior work, but have never worked with siding before, and don't want to butcher things. I've looked for ideas, but haven't seen anything yet other than soffit installs. I need a solution for putting a dome or bullet camera on the siding itself. Are there any tips or techniques that you can share on this? Thanks in advance for any advice.

OK, thanks for the advice. That matches my initial thoughts on the install, but I also started thinking about the aesthetics, and how the light fixtures are on special pieces, and thought I might want to try to replicate that. I just wasn't sure what the "standard" practice was for cameras. edit: OK, so I was being a moron, or my Google juju was running low. I finally found the correct set of keywords to find the item I was thinking of: Vinyl Siding Surface Block. Exactly what I was hoping to find. I hope this helps someone else down the road. Thanks again for your tips!

The house is only 6 years old, so it's just OSB sheathing underneath. I won't have any trouble routing the cables, since most of the places I want to put a camera are exterior walls of the garage. I'll be able to pop the cable straight through behind the camera location if I want, or route it down to the foundation and put it through near the band-board if I want the inside to stay neat. My main concern is getting a good solid mount for the camera, while keeping the siding weather tight. I'm not sure if I need to put a box in for a mounting point, or if there is a bracket or block of some sort I can mount directly to the sheathing, then trim out/flash the siding around it. What's the correct way to handle this?

Sorry I missed this in my earlier reading of the thread. This just confirms my suspicion. Any address that begins with 192 is not routable on the internet (internal use only). Since your ISP is giving your router a WAN address of 192.168.2.??? (the last set will change every few days, probably), your router is NOT visible to any system outside of your ISP. It _cannot_ be accessed from the internet unless they set up special routing for your system. There is no good solution short of getting a public IP address, period.

The problem is that your ISP is using NAT (Network Address Translation) routing, just like your own router is doing for your local network. NAT routing hides a large number of machines behind one IP address. For example your local network is 192.168.1.???, but the router's outside address might be 172.16.38.28 (just made up). Normally, all the computers on the internet would see your system as 172.16.38.28, but your ISP has added another layer of NAT. This means that all of their _clients_ computers on the ISP's network will have addresses in the 172.16.???.??? range, but to the outside world they _all_ look like 11.22.33.44. This second layer of indirection is what is killing you. Also note that IP addresses between 172.16.0.0 through 17.32.255.255 are not publicly routable - they will NEVER be available on the general internet. The way NAT routing works is that a request from INSIDE the network sets up a temporary tunnel, or virtual connection between your computer and the outside computer (google.com, for instance). The Router knows of this connection, and it automatically redirects the return traffic from google to the right computer. Requests to connect that originate from outside the local network to a computer inside the local network, however, just try to hit 11.22.33.44, and that router has no idea which of the internal computers that request was for. So it drops the packet. When you set up port forwarding on your router, you are saying "Send any packets sent to 172.16.38.28:1000 to the internal computer 192.168.1.10". This lets an outside system start a conversation with a specific computer on your network. However, since your ISP is also using NAT, you would have to have THEM set up a rule on THEIR router that says "Send any packets sent to 11.22.33.44:1000 to the internal computer 172.16.28.28:1000", where your local router rule would pick it up and send it to your computer. And they will not do that. If they will not rent you a public, routable IP address, then your only option is to find another ISP who will. For a bit more information, you can see a list of the non-routable IP addresses (these usually get used behind NAT routers) here: http://www.jpsdomain.org/networking/nat.html. Information on NAT can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation