aussie_warrior

Hi all, I'm very new to IP cameras / home security, so I'm likely to ask some silly questions, but here goes anyway. I'm interested in installing a couple of cameras in my house to basically record 24/7, with a rolling storage on my NAS (of whatever size I need). At the moment the Geovision GE-FE520 look pretty good as I can use them with PoE, look like they would easily meet the requirements of a home install, plus I like the fact they're reasonably unobtrusive. The camera locations I'm thinking of are: - I have a central location in my house that can see lots of areas (open plan) and it's unlikely that if anyone got in the house that they would go there. All sort of close up 5-10m distances. - Out the front under a veranda / eve type thing, that covers a wider area. You'd struggle to get in the house without being up by this camera. Up to 15-20m in distance. I guess for home security it would be about picking up enough info of the 'bad guy' to be useful to the police etc. The home alarm itself will hopefully be the deterrent part. So, a couple of questions - Setup looks very simple, I literally install the camera, plug in a cable from a PoE switch, and it will obtain and IP (or static IP) and I'm good to go? I can't find a manual online to confirm this. - Is this camera suitable? Particularly the 520 being 'outside', but in a very protected area. Has anyone installed one of these in a similar area? - I assume that if I store the files on the NAS, that I can access the camera's IP from the Internet (if I'm not home) and playback video as well as live? Can you allocate a certain amount of space so that it overwrites older files? - Can the cameras store to the SD card and to the NAS at the same time? or is it one or the other? It's a Linux based NAS, but I assume that shouldn't be a problem either. - The front camera is also near the front door and would easily be a good a video intercom... has anyone used this? I suspect it'd just be a novelty anyway, but I'll ask anyway. - Have I forgotten anything? If you need anymore info then let me know. Thanks in advance.

Hi, Thanks, that's a fantastic reply. But I think I've found an issue. Can I confirm that I cannot record directly from the camera to the NAS unless their is a PC up and running? I was planning on just sharing some disk from the NAS and have the camera record directly to it. The NAS is running 24/7, but I tend to turn the computers off. Also, the NAS is Linux, which there seems to be little support for. With this setup I assumed (maybe wrongly) that the camera can access the storage for recording and playback (part of the house intranet), and then I can open up the camera to remote access for playback and live viewing from the Internet. That way I'm not opening up the NAS to the world. I could set up firewall rules on the router and the NAS itself to lower the risk, but still it's not as simple as I thought it would be.