Hello, I’m wondering what the consensus is (if there is one) on the best hardware and software (open source very much preferred, runs in Docker is a must) to use for privacy-respecting, self-hosted security cameras. I have always wanted to avoid feeding the surveillance state and have never had a security camera but unfortunately I recently saw evidence of someone trying to break into my home. I searched Lemmy for posts on this topic and only found one from two years ago: https://lemmy.world/post/12726787. I assume things are a bit different now so I’m basically making the same post again as OP. Thanks in advance for any tips anyone may have for me.
PS. My experience level is that I currently run several self-hosted solutions via Docker and have been doing so for a few years. I am not a networking guru but I do understand the basics, and I’ve setup pihole in the past (but deactivated it due to some false-positive issues). If there’s a reason to stand that back up in order to prevent otherwise private cameras from “phoning home”, I can do that.
the reason I didnt address anything you asked earlier is because I don’t think people generally need this crap and it’s probably a mistake for me to have explained how a person can make semi decent decisions about rolling their own.
Ram doesn’t matter. You can buy more, yes even when it’s expensive. The reason it doesn’t matter if that your needs will vary wildly based on your workload. I don’t know your workload so I can’t recommend an amount of ram. Maybe start with 16gb for a few cameras and a zpool based storage.
You want an old server because consumer hardware has no pcie lanes and is in general designed around a short duty cycle which is how you get such great “efficiency” numbers out of consumer equipment compared to a computer designed to reliably run 24/7. Of course your computer isn’t using any electricity, it’s not fucking doing anything.
The os doesn’t actually matter. Just use whatever you can keep running reliably. If you need to ask what you can keep running reliably then buy an off the shelf solution.
Don’t use proxmox or some hypervisor. The whole point isn’t to have a cool hackerman surveillance room with a bunch of screens like in the movies, it’s to have a reliable record of what your cameras captured. Fewer things to fail is better.
If you need to ask if a raspberry pi is appropriate then a raspberry pi is not appropriate. That’s true in all situations but here’s why it’s true here: you would only use a sbc for this application because you either don’t have anything else or you’re worried about energy consumption. If you don’t have anything else then it doesn’t matter if it’s a smart choice and if you’re worried about energy consumption then you’re not factoring in the energy cost of maintaining a place for a human being to exist and look at the screens attached to the pi or you havent considered simply turning off the terminal when it’s not in use.
Don’t do an ip camera based security system as a learning experience. What you will learn is that it was a big waste of time and isn’t practical.
Thank you for your response, I appreciate you being real about this.
If you’re doing surveillance of people for extrajudicial reasons, constantly need to report crime or are just slurping up all the images of what goes on around your location for some project then it might be useful.
For responding practically to sudden and unexpected crime, dumb game cameras are the goat. They’re cheap, completely self contained, simple, relatively camouflaged (at the very least they’re not a black dome or a hooded ptz up in the corner) and when you need to turn footage over to the cops you can give them the “originals” (the sd card) and keep a copy if they require the originals.
Thanks!