Routers & Other Networking Stuff

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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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So trying to plan my network. Currently have a usg, switch-8 150v and ac-ap-pro. House is concrete block walls. Currently coax comes through attic, runs outside then back into house..

First, I want to run ethernet to the attic and connect the switch-8 up there then run nanohd's to bedroom. Was thinking of running the ethernet line via conduit next to the coax outside and using a plate like the one in the attached image.

However, I want to do long PoE runs to outdoor cameras. Would be easier to do something like a switch flex on the outside but then my switch-8 would be daisy chained off it and I don't like the idea of aggregating all my traffic through that one port on the flex.

Any ideas?
 
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Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

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Foler said:
So trying to plan my network. Currently have a usg, switch-8 150v and ac-ap-pro. House is concrete block walls. Currently coax comes through attic, runs outside then back into house..

First, I want to run ethernet to the attic and connect the switch-8 up there then run nanohd's to bedroom. Was thinking of running the ethernet line via conduit next to the coax outside and using a plate like the one in the attached image.

However, I want to do long PoE runs to outdoor cameras. Would be easier to do something like a switch flex on the outside but then my switch-8 would be daisy chained off it and I don't like the idea of aggregating all my traffic through that one port on the flex.

Any ideas?

View attachment 288106
Click to expand...

1) Run ethernet wherever *convenient* in the house, but don't discount the value and reliability of powerline adapters. I've seen people kill themselves and/or make a mess running cable, when a $50 powerline adapter would achieve the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

2) It's hard to make a recommendation for outside without having some details regarding how many cameras, how far away from the house, and their distance from each other. If all the cameras will be within 300 feet of each other, then run two ballpark runs of ethernet cable to an outdoor switch in an etherchannel config, and hang all your cameras off that. If all the cameras are distributed in a way that they all can't link up to that switch, then you're better off replacing that switch with an outdoor AP with omni antenna, using wifi on the cameras, and finding an alternate power source, like solar panels.
 
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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Frenzied Wombat said:
1) Run ethernet wherever *convenient* in the house, but don't discount the value and reliability of powerline adapters. I've seen people kill themselves and/or make a mess running cable, when a $50 powerline adapter would achieve the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

2) It's hard to make a recommendation for outside without having some details regarding how many cameras, how far away from the house, and their distance from each other. If all the cameras will be within 300 feet of each other, then run two ballpark runs of ethernet cable to an outdoor switch in an etherchannel config, and hang all your cameras off that. If all the cameras are distributed in a way that they all can't link up to that switch, then you're better off replacing that switch with an outdoor AP with omni antenna, using wifi on the cameras, and finding an alternate power source, like solar panels.
Click to expand...
Powerline as in PoE injector?

That'd be ideal but concrete walls are killing my wireless, so I thought running the switch to the attic then doing poe to ceiling mounts to be best solution. I hate going in that damn attic too because the wiring is 60 years old and it's not secured so you end up rubbing up against some ot it.

What outdoor AP would you recommend? I'm planning on using a solar panel for power source on camera. Maybe unifi mesh or mesh pro's?
 
Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

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Foler said:
Powerline as in PoE injector?

That'd be ideal but concrete walls are killing my wireless, so I thought running the switch to the attic then doing poe to ceiling mounts to be best solution. I hate going in that damn attic too because the wiring is 60 years old and it's not secured so you end up rubbing up against some ot it.

What outdoor AP would you recommend? I'm planning on using a solar panel for power source on camera. Maybe unifi mesh or mesh pro's?
Click to expand...

No something like these, but if your wiring really is 60 years old they may not work properly:
Amazon product ASIN B00AWRUICG
For a recent outdoor install I did, I ran about 250 feet of cable in conduit to this mounted on two trees (each one opposite sides of the property), which distributed signal to six cameras, three on each side of the house.

unifi-mesh.ui.com

Access Point AC Mesh - Ubiquiti Store

Compact, indoor/outdoor WiFi 5 AP with 4 spatial streams and optional external antenna support for directional coverage.
unifi-mesh.ui.com unifi-mesh.ui.com
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Frenzied Wombat said:
No something like these, but if your wiring really is 60 years old they may not work properly:
Amazon product ASIN B00AWRUICG
For a recent outdoor install I did, I ran about 250 feet of cable in conduit to this mounted on two trees (each one opposite sides of the property), which distributed signal to six cameras, three on each side of the house.

unifi-mesh.ui.com

Access Point AC Mesh - Ubiquiti Store

Compact, indoor/outdoor WiFi 5 AP with 4 spatial streams and optional external antenna support for directional coverage.
unifi-mesh.ui.com unifi-mesh.ui.com
Click to expand...
Ahh that's neat. Ya it's all old cloth wire. It's grounded though!

Yeah only problem if getting power to that AP next to the camera is gonna require PoE which brings back to the original question, what's the best way to do it without doubling back from the switch in the attic and down the side of the house. Would a USG pro, run a switch on the second lan just for outdoors cameras, help with network congestion since it wouldn't be daisy chaining switches?
 
Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

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Foler said:
Ahh that's neat. Ya it's all old cloth wire. It's grounded though!

Yeah only problem if getting power to that AP next to the camera is gonna require PoE which brings back to the original question, what's the best way to do it without doubling back from the switch in the attic and down the side of the house. Would a USG pro, run a switch on the second lan just for outdoors cameras, help with network congestion since it wouldn't be daisy chaining switches?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure why your coax comes into your attic, back outside your house, and then into your ground floor. Why not just put your router/switch in the attic, or feed the coax from the attic directly to your 2nd/1st floor? Also, why not just put the switch on the outside of the house in a weather enclosure?

Also, you are over thinking/worrying about congestion. Your cameras won't be passing enough throughput to overload anything. Each one probably won't be passing more than 5mb/s traffic when recording, and if you're going the solar route I assume you will be using motion activation rather than 24/7 recording. Your cameras will be feeding off a single AP, which doesn't even have the capability of saturating the ethernet link even if it was working at max capacity.
 
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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Frenzied Wombat said:
I'm not sure why your coax comes into your attic, back outside your house, and then into your ground floor. Why not just put your router/switch in the attic, or feed the coax from the attic directly to your 2nd/1st floor? Also, why not just put the switch on the outside of the house in a weather enclosure?

Also, you are over thinking/worrying about congestion. Your cameras won't be passing enough throughput to overload anything. Each one probably won't be passing more than 5mb/s traffic when recording, and if you're going the solar route I assume you will be using motion activation rather than 24/7 recording. Your cameras will be feeding off a single AP, which doesn't even have the capability of saturating the ethernet link even if it was working at max capacity.
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I mean putting the modem in the attic is an option. Sure as hell would make this a lot easier. Attic has no AC and it's pretty tiny up there. I don't think that'd be an issue? Any downside to having to grab a ladder to check modem status? I cant think of any.

It's a one story house. Concrete block poured walls and that's it so running cable down them isn't super feasible. The line comes underground to the other side of the house then snaked up along the side and into the attic.
 
Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

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Foler said:
I mean putting the modem in the attic is an option. Sure as hell would make this a lot easier. Attic has no AC and it's pretty tiny up there. I don't think that'd be an issue? Any downside to having to grab a ladder to check modem status? I cant think of any.

It's a one story house. Concrete block poured walls and that's it so running cable down them isn't super feasible. The line comes underground to the other side of the house then snaked up along the side and into the attic.
Click to expand...

Put it all in the attic and do your runs from there. Temp shouldn't be an issue if it stays within 38-100 degrees. At least for me, I don't have to physically check my modem more than maybe once a year, but I understand that varies from install to install. Absent that, I still don't understand why you ran the line back out the house, why didn't you just drop it from the attic floor into the inside wall of a 1st floor location?
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Frenzied Wombat said:
Put it all in the attic and do your runs from there. Temp shouldn't be an issue if it stays within 38-100 degrees. At least for me, I don't have to physically check my modem more than maybe once a year, but I understand that varies from install to install. Absent that, I still don't understand why you ran the line back out the house, why didn't you just drop it from the attic floor into the inside wall of a 1st floor location?
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Its Florida so it's hot and humid as hell. Id be running my modem, usg, cloud key g2 and switch all up there. If you think that's fine I'll give it a shot. Beats my initial plan.

Edit - I may have a closet I can drop everything into via attic to keep it out of heat. Lemme brainstorm and look around. Thanks for help.
 
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Burns

Burns

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The second gen Cloud Key gets rather hot, and Florida attics can probably get as hot at Texas, which is ~ 150 to 160 (if it hits 95 to 105 outside). Maybe send Ubiquiti tech support an email, and see what they say for their various equipment.
 
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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Burns said:
The second gen Cloud Key gets rather hot, and Florida attics can probably get as hot at Texas, which is ~ 150 to 160 (if it hits 95 to 105 outside). Maybe send Ubiquiti tech support an email, and see what they say for their various equipment.
Click to expand...
Gonna skip putting it in attic. It's just too hot and humid. I think there's a pantry that I can put the gear in. Just hoping the air handler in the attic doesnt sit right on top of it otherwise I won't be able to get access. Will find out tomorrow.
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Maybe done questions but I found a pantry to put my modem, router, etc in and then just put wall plates on the ceiling to run coax to modem and cat5e to router.

Will any generic rj45 wall plate work for poe? Like
Amazon product ASIN B07M896ZZ5
How about coax wall plates? Any F connector plate like this will work? Amazon product ASIN B002FYCMC8
Finally, gonna be cutting the coax cable the ISP ran through the attic and terminating it above the pantry. Is that just a rg6 cable connector I need?

Amazon product ASIN B06XGTRQ9Y
Does brand/material matter for any of this shit or can I just order what I linked? I need max bits going through cables 😜
 
Burns

Burns

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Foler said:
Maybe done questions but I found a pantry to put my modem, router, etc in and then just put wall plates on the ceiling to run coax to modem and cat5e to router.

Will any generic rj45 wall plate work for poe? Like
Amazon product ASIN B07M896ZZ5
How about coax wall plates? Any F connector plate like this will work? Amazon product ASIN B002FYCMC8
Finally, gonna be cutting the coax cable the ISP ran through the attic and terminating it above the pantry. Is that just a rg6 cable connector I need?

Amazon product ASIN B06XGTRQ9Y
Does brand/material matter for any of this shit or can I just order what I linked? I need max bits going through cables 😜
Click to expand...


That female to female plate would work fine and PoE should work with any RJ45 plug, as long as it is using the standard wiring schematics. I think there are some specialty ways to wire RJ45, but I am not familiar with those, and haven't seen them around, outside of seeing 2 reference diagrams on a couple wiring tools.

Coax is coax, and a more simple wire; so I don't think there are much variations with those plugs and cables. Best guess would be that your ISP uses RG6, but it should be written on the cable, if you want to make sure.

As far as brands, when I was looking at wiring my own RJ45s, every review page I looked at on Amazon seemed to have at least one review saying "I'm a professional installer, and these plugs where the worst." So it was difficult to churn though all the different plugs, or tools, for that matter. Ultimately, a decent tool was $60+, so it was never worth it to wire it myself, over just buying preset lengths from Monoprices.
 
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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Burns said:
That female to female plate would work fine and PoE should work with any RJ45 plug, as long as it is using the standard wiring schematics. I think there are some specialty ways to wire RJ45, but I am not familiar with those, and haven't seen them around, outside of seeing 2 reference diagrams on a couple wiring tools.

Coax is coax, and a more simple wire; so I don't think there are much variations with those plugs and cables. Best guess would be that your ISP uses RG6, but it should be written on the cable, if you want to make sure.

As far as brands, when I was looking at wiring my own RJ45s, every review page I looked at on Amazon seemed to have at least one review saying "I'm a professional installer, and these plugs where the worst." So it was difficult to churn though all the different plugs, or tools, for that matter. Ultimately, a decent tool was $60+, so it was never worth it to wire it myself, over just buying preset lengths from Monoprices.
Click to expand...
Already bought a roll of unifi toughcable, crimper and ends. Had the electrician put a power jack in the ceiling in pantry. Will put coax and ethernet there next week myself. Will report back results.

20200729_134217-01.jpeg
 
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Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Burns said:
If your going to upgrade your camera system, you might as well go with the shit that the CCP use to track everyone, Dahua or Hikvision. Most of the really bad shit is going to happen at night, so you should choose a security camera based on night performance; which is the most difficult to get right. If you have an old computer sitting around (to use as a dedicated box) you can run all your security though a software called BlueIris; which is suppose to be amazing.

There is a bit more setting up required. You should isolate your camera system on its on LAN or VLAN, which have their own rules on what can connect to it. When looking at them remotely, you should have a VPN set up on your network (or Gateway), to dial into your system directly. If going the more robust BlueIris server, you will need to set that up too. The cameras all seem to be PoE though, so only running one CaT6 is nice.

I went with the cheep route, for a first set up, of 2 Dahua Starlight line of cameras (a 1080 and a 1440 @ ~$130 each) and a Dahua DVR with WD Purple HDD (~$200). I set up my TP-Link PoE switch on the UniFi gateway's LAN2 port, and isolated it from the internet and other networks in the firewall.

After reading some more, I kinda wish I spent a couple hundred more and got a machine to run dedicated BlueIris on (like a midlevel Intel NUC - maybe), as it might be easier to use, after the initial hiccup of learning how to set it up.


Links:
IPCamTalk forum, direct link to cameras:

IP Cameras

All IP Camera talk / firmware updates with popular brands as sub-sections.
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com

IPCamTalk direct link to Wiki:

IP Cam Talk Wiki

Thank you for viewing our wiki! If you would like to contribute, please [URL='https://ipcamtalk.com/misc/contact']contact us[/URL]...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
Click to expand...
Got my first trespassers yesterday. Caught them on my arlo pro 3 floodlight cam. Tried to immediately go live view so I could say something and shit froze up. Recorded them fine. After an hour of angrily troubleshoot i restarted it only to be prompted with a firmware update that fixed it 🙄.

Have more arlo cameras incoming. My schedule frees up starting tomorrow so gonna start looking into IP cam solutions. I want to be able to respond as fast as possible to trespassers. My security setup would be multi phase. Property is 18 acres so by the time a trespasser has reached the house then that's too late for a notification for me as house sits far into property.. I'd like an early warning system closer to perimeter and maybe IP doing long ethernet runs is the best solution...

I also looked at some of those motion detection chimes you can daisy chain but imagine animals would set them off way too often.

Looks like blue iris does have motion detection. Only looked into it briefly. Tbh I'd like to tinker with my own software, maybe use tensorflow and opencv to detect real time motion then push the stream to AWS when motion is detected and send text message alerts. Will have to look into feasibility this week. Of course tensorflow is python and opencv is c++. Prob two of the last major languages I haven't touched yet. 😑
 
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Burns

Burns

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Foler said:
Got my first trespassers yesterday. Caught them on my arlo pro 3 floodlight cam. Tried to immediately go live view so I could say something and shit froze up. Recorded them fine. After an hour of angrily troubleshoot i restarted it only to be prompted with a firmware update that fixed it 🙄.

Have more arlo cameras incoming. My schedule frees up starting tomorrow so gonna start looking into IP cam solutions. I want to be able to respond as fast as possible to trespassers. My security setup would be multi phase. Property is 18 acres so by the time a trespasser has reached the house then that's too late for a notification for me as house sits far into property.. I'd like an early warning system closer to perimeter and maybe IP doing long ethernet runs is the best solution...

I also looked at some of those motion detection chimes you can daisy chain but imagine animals would set them off way too often.

Looks like blue iris does have motion detection. Only looked into it briefly. Tbh I'd like to tinker with my own software, maybe use tensorflow and opencv to detect real time motion then push the stream to AWS when motion is detected and send text message alerts. Will have to look into feasibility this week. Of course tensorflow is python and opencv is c++. Prob two of the last major languages I haven't touched yet. 😑
Click to expand...

Vehicle or foot traffic trespassing? If vehicle, why not get motorized gates at each entry way? You don't need to have a full fence set up even, just a section on each side to keep people from driving around it easily. Set up an alarm on your gate for when its open. If you wanted to get fancy, you could set it up on home automation software like "Home Assistant" (free, open source software for home automation) with a wireless transceiver, out to the gate, and have it send notification when it's open. If the gate is closed, and your cameras (second line of defense) pick up a vehicle, you can immediately call the police and arm yourself, as my first assumption is that anyone driving around a gate is looking for trouble (Disclaimer: dont shoot at anyone, unless you can prove they were a threat, obviously).

Programming your own software sounds like a hell of a task, when BlueIris is fairly cheep (for business software), and well supported. According to the ip cam forum, the good Chinese cams can differentiate between animals and humans/vehicles, most of the time (depending on range from camera). Many people used these systems professionally, where response time is a key factor, so I would think BlueIris would be fairly responsive on notifications.
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Burns said:
Vehicle or foot traffic trespassing? If vehicle, why not get motorized gates at each entry way? You don't need to have a full fence set up even, just a section on each side to keep people from driving around it easily. Set up an alarm on your gate for when its open. If you wanted to get fancy, you could set it up on home automation software like "Home Assistant" (free, open source software for home automation) with a wireless transceiver, out to the gate, and have it send notification when it's open. If the gate is closed, and your cameras (second line of defense) pick up a vehicle, you can immediately call the police and arm yourself, as my first assumption is that anyone driving around a gate is looking for trouble (Disclaimer: dont shoot at anyone, unless you can prove they were a threat, obviously).

Programming your own software sounds like a hell of a task, when BlueIris is fairly cheep (for business software), and well supported. According to the ip cam forum, the good Chinese cams can differentiate between animals and humans/vehicles, most of the time (depending on range from camera). Many people used these systems professionally, where response time is a key factor, so I would think BlueIris would be fairly responsive on notifications.
Click to expand...
Nah no vehicles. None can get in. Just foot traffic. If it was vehicles, well then we'd have a realll problem.
 
Burns

Burns

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Foler said:
Nah no vehicles. None can get in. Just foot traffic. If it was vehicles, well then we'd have a realll problem.
Click to expand...

Having a lot of foot traffic on 18 acres seems kinda weird. Mostly kids wandering around? You can get teen/kid dispersal sirens (Mosquito alarm) that are in frequencies that 30+ year olds cant usually hear. Put one of those on blast with a motion detector in front of your camera, then laugh at the kids, as it scares the crap out of them.
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Burns said:
Having a lot of foot traffic on 18 acres seems kinda weird. Mostly kids wandering around? You can get teen/kid dispersal sirens (Mosquito alarm) that are in frequencies that 30+ year olds cant usually hear. Put one of those on blast with a motion detector in front of your camera, then laugh at the kids, as it scares the crap out of them.
Click to expand...
Not a ton and it will probably be even less once I move out there later this month and establish my residency. Altho that mosquito alarm looks dope and now i want one.
 
Crone

Crone

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Going to be getting into the attic this weekend to relocate my router and I really want to make the switch to ubiquiti hardware, but will probably hold off. Doing a remodel and the old living room is turning into a big kitchen and dining area so I don't want the router and modem there anymore.

Should be a good time!
 
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