Thomas

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0750678003/sr=8-1/qid=1143666433/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-3018721-7897551?%5Fencoding=UTF8 This book can give you the basics. It is a textbook and as such is rather dry.

Please note that acting like an arrogent prick is reserved strickly for the mods. Also note that lecturing people on forum etiquette after your first few posts is not a good way to keep a thread going. So on that note, the next smart ass comment here is going to get the thread locked.

I was thinking in terms of a failure point rather then speed.

I do not recall asking for defense or justification of actions, simply that they halt. kg6mti, I would like to point out something that I belive is the source of confusion. You made a statement about hobby forums, and I think you think that the posters here see it that way. For most of the posters, this industry is how they pay thier bills. The installers who post here see themselves as professionals. Many have seen the handy work of DIYers and it doesn't hold a candle to a real installers work. Running the coax is the trival part. Camera placement, selecting the right kind of camera, looking at how the light will affect the camera, focusing it...those are the hard part. At the same time, if all someone has add to the discussion is that "find a professional" is your option they are in the wrong. But pointing out why someone should choose an installer over DIY and supporting it is a valid discussion point. And now to nitpick your system, if I am reading your post correctly the Geovision system is writing to an offsite NFS share?

I think there are some basics that need to be gone over here. I suspect to reach your goals, you will need to have well over 8 cameras. For any kind of recognition you need to have the face take up a third of the image. Same with plates. At 100' facial recognition is going to be extremely expensive. Both for the cameras needed and the number of cameras needed. But I'm guessing you have a budget and that budget isn't going to allow for that kind of cost. I'm going to suggest you select certain areas as ones you need to cover.

Guys take a day to cool off if need be. CSG and kg6mti in particular, I would perfer it if you both take a breath. CSG, end users come here for help. If you don't want to give it, fine. Please don't get into pissing matches with them though. If more end users spent time educating themselves then there would be less "can I read a licence plate at 5000' with this $50 camera?" questions. kg6mti, if I can point out to you that experance in one field does not translate into experance in other fields. I know of a few installers here with networks that compare in complexity to what you discribed. Waving an e-peen here isn't going to get you respect.

Getting depth of field out to 100' and covering a 100' x 100' area isn't possible with current and even next generation cameras. The further out you focus a camera, the smaller your width will be. Can you post a rough sketch of the layout for the cameras?

It's not perfect but we have support for the 650.

Eh, the Dell website has a education section and they have Texas DIR as an option. All of the contracts that Dell has worked out with any goverment agency always is above end user or bussiness cost. Even thier prices on the GSA are higher then retail.

They make trays for that. And you are right, public schools do have differant pricing. $1000 more in the case of the PE 1800.

The jump from the GX620 to the Poweredge 1800 is a pretty good jump. Why not look at the 430's or 800?

There is a certain amount of art in installing cameras. The really good installers view an installation like a photographer. You need to understand how light will affect your view, how the light will change. How will humans walk through the picture. What do I want to see? Any idiot can run cable. Even I can run cable. Understanding the basic rules of cable laying are pretty easy. Camera placement, how differant lights affect the picture, differant times of day and thier effects....those are the hard things.

Eh, given the number of DIYers we see, I would perfer to keep this thread here.

It depends on which parts of Dell you work with. If you are buying Dimentions or Precision machines....good luck. If you work with thier server lines like the PowerEdge lines then you get better support. When I was on the support side, I would just need to call, say I did tests x,y, and z and I need this part. Either the part would in my hands in one to two days or a Dell tech would be on site to replace the parts. There are some plus sides to using the better Dell equipment. The hardware is very vanilla, and very consistant. I've had conversations with some support/product dev people from another compnay in town and thier failure rate on whiteboxes is a number that I find insane. I can't imagine staying in bussiness with that kind of failure rate.

A "bridge" is a device that connects two networks and just does NAT. (Network Address Translation) Usually that means it's smarter then a huh, and a bit dumber then a router.

The general rule of thumb I use is between 1.5 Mb/s and 2.5 Mb/s per camera. They work great if I have a seperate gigabit internal network. So it's doable to stream to a DVR (an NVR is the same thing) and then let the DVR handle the stream to a multi-site applications.

To feed 60 IP cameras or Axis video servers? I wouldn't try it on less then a full T3 on the incomming side. For this application I would suggest analog cameras into a local DVR with multisite software of some kind.

Given your set up then you would want to use four seperate DVRs. You won't have anywhere near enough bandwith to handle that many IP cameras. You could feed the DVRs to a central location for monitoring. There are a number of options for viewing the DVR's, and most PC based DVRs and standalones have software to let you do multisite.

Auto power on is a common feature in most PC BIOSs.

Why 30 fps?

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2005-12-07-baseball-security-cam_x.htm?csp=34 http://www.odfopt.com/ It's an IP based camera which mounts the camera on a gyro.[/url]

I have seen 1 fps = 1 IPS or 2 IPS depending on the company. And to be clearer, by FPS I mean frames per second (rather then fields). 30 FPS is pretty easy to find, most videos/DVDs should be at 30 fps.

We can. It's going to vary by camera model a little, some of them require a little more CPU power then others. With the Toshiba WB-02A (Middle of the road for CPU load) we have run 85 cameras on one server at 5 fps per camera. (Server specs: Dual Xeon 2.8s 1 GB Ram XP Pro Dell Poweredge 1800) More then 85 cameras I would worry about the load on the NIC even if I added more CPU power.

1 out of 5 is a rather insane failure rate for hard drives no matter the application. Are you sure about drive failure being the cause of death?

Nope. The posts have to demostrate knowage of the industry as a reseller. Posts in this section or in Test Bench do not count. And if I feel you are gaming the system, then don't expect access ever.