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Ask HN: Home/Office Monitoring System

6 points by climber ↗ HN
We just got a new office; and for security purposes, we'd like to have a bunch of webcams, with data streamed to a centralized server (for motion detection / logging).

"Privacy" is not a problem as it's a small company and all the founders are okay with it.

What are the best open source tools for this? We'd like the backend to be linux, and for the actual cameras, just get a bunch of cheap cameras (that can hopefully stream over wireless or network).

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noonespecial
Head on over to http://www.zoneminder.com/ and check out the live cd. That will let you see if it will work with your hardware and let you take it for a test drive.

We liked it so much better than the multi-kilo-buck commercial offerings that we use it everywhere, even where we had expensive proprietary setups before.

evilneanderthal
We used a combination of cheap ($20) webcams, motion, cron, nagios, and cfengine at Drexel to provide 24/7 monitoring of our CS labs.

It isn't streaming video but it's good enough (several pictures per second while there is motion in the room).

Since installation is has been used to solve exactly 0 crimes, which was in line with our intent.