I don’t currently have them, but there is (or was?) a NoIR version of the Pi cameras that didn’t have IR filters. That should let the IR LED illuminators work same as most other cameras advertised with night vision.

Right?!

That’s actually my current setup :)

Got some old analog cameras at an estate sale, gutted them, and put some Pi + camera modules inside. Couldn’t get the original optics to work with it, and they lack PoE, but they’re otherwise doing well (3 years and going). Just occasionally have to reboot them more than I’d like.

Haven’t messed with v4lrtsp server, but zoneminder has been good to me. Will check that out.

“NVR” in my case is just Zoneminder lol. I run it on a dedicated USFF PC and didn’t want to deal with multi-homing it or a USB ethernet adapter. When I upgrade it, yeah, I’ll probably get something with a dual NIC and go that route.

Right now, yeah, it’s all DIY since I scrapped those cameras years ago (neither held up well to UV after 6-7 months outdoors), so I’m less concerned about it with all of them being RPis now. The only thing I lack is PoE since I didn’t want to spring for the HATs.

Yeah, that was my old setup: dedicated VLAN with the NVR and cameras in it. Had a firewall rule so I could access the NVR from regular LAN but nothing “got out” of the camera VLAN without being requested from the LAN first.

At first I had the NVR in the LAN with FW rules to reach the cameras in their VLAN, but my FW at the time struggled with all the simultaneous streams going through it so I moved the NVR in with the cams.

Maybe I’ll just stick with my current setup of just getting old analog camera housings and sticking Raspberry Pi + camera module inside lol

Don’t all cheap IP cameras feed back to at least one server in China?

I bought two different no-name brands from Amazon several years back, and both models of them were trying to call home. I ran them on an isolated network, so they couldn’t get anywhere, but they were persistent little buggers. Oh, and the root password to one of them was hardcoded to “1234567” lol

Tangent, but if anyone can recommend a good IP camera that just craps out an RTSP stream locally and doesn’t phone home anywhere, DM me lol.

That’s what I was thinking, but wasn’t sure enough to say beyond “give it a shot and see”.

There might be some savings to be had by enabling compression, though it would depend on what format the images are in to start with. If they’re already in a compressed format, it would probably just be a waste of CPU to try compressing them further at the filesystem level.

Not sure if a de-duplicating filesystem would help with that or not. Depends, I guess, on if there are similarities between the similar images at the block level.

Maybe try setting up a small, test ZFS pool, enabling de-dup, adding some similar images, and then checking the de-dupe rate? If that works, then you can plan a more permanent ZFS (or other filesystem that supports de-duplication) setup to hold your images.

Thanks! Wish I had more time to work on it lately, but life has been getting in the way.

Tesseract was originally kind-of a cross between Photon and Alexandrite, though it’s evolved separately from both since then. May still be close enough for your taste?

Github

TIL dolphins could be incels.

It’s like when T-Mobile and Sprint merged in the US. Both were pretty garbage networks, and now it’s a really big garbage network.

I almost went with OPNsense (having previously used pfSense), but everything else was already on OpenWRT so I decided to keep things consistent. OPNsense is a solid choice, too.

The barracuda I have is basically an x64 board in a 1U half-depth case with two extra network adapters (3 total including the onboard one). I have two of them: one’s running OpenWRT (my router) and the other vanilla Debian.

So if my router one dies, I can just either pull the drive from it or restore a config backup to another suitable PC that has two NICs (or promote the second unit I have).

The config in openwrt is abstracted. So if the hardware and NICs are totally different, you might need to reconfigure the device names in the config so they’re referencing the right NICs, but everything else should “just work” (e.g. WAN and LAN are just arbitrary labels).

If going the route of a backup solution, is it feasible to install OpenWRT on all of my devices, with the expectation that I can do some sort of automated backups of all settings and configurations, and restore in case of a router dying?

That’s what I do. Every device runs OpenWRT except my ONT. Backing up is just a cron script that calls each one and pulls the config.

For my router, I ended up buying an old Barracuda LoadBalancer 340 and installing OpenWRT (it’s an x86 device so it was super easy). It’s a little over-powered for a router, but the price was right. It’s got more than enough spare resources to run some extra stuff, including Docker, so I’m probably going to throw my PiHole container on there since I haven’t been impressed with AdGuard Home (which is available in the repos).

And if you go for an old Barracuda unit like I did, the default BIOS password is bcndk1

Analog TV were a lot more susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI) and would go all fuzzy.

Old vacuum cleaners had motors that put out a lot of EMI, so every time someone in the house would run the vacuum the TV would start acting up. (Wasn’t just vacuum cleaners: any appliance with a big motor could, but they were usually far enough away from the TV to not be an issue)

Better shielding on appliances and the switch to digital/LCD TVs that weren’t susceptible to that form of interference all but made that problem disappear.

I feel like I’m a million years old for getting this reference.

My instance is actually smaller than .cafe, I believe.

I’ve thought about opening it up a bit more (midwest.social kind of covers the tri-state area as far as being a regional instance), but haven’t made a decision on that yet.

As far as the vibe here, it’s basically “Beehaw but with downvotes enabled” lol.

(Laughs in ‘doesn’t federate with .ml’)

Wouldn’t restoring from such a backup be equivalent to kill -9 or pulling the cable and restarting the service?

Disclaimer: Not familiar with Immich, but this is what I’ve experienced generally.

AFAIK, effectively yes. The only thing you might lose is anything in memory that hasn’t been written to disk at the time the snapshot was taken (which is still effectively equivalent to kill -9).

At work, we use Veeam which is snapshot based, and database server restores (or spinning up a test DB based off of production) work just fine. That said, we still take scheduled dumps/backups of the database servers just to have known-good states to roll back to if ever the need arises.