Hardware Suggestions for 5-8 camera deployment

[Liath]

Hey there everyone,
Hoping to help a friend set up cameras at his business. He currently is using a really cheap Samsung DVR, and isn't very impressed now that his needs have increased.
Since Zoneminder is capable of being viewed from his home (one of his requirements), I told him about Zoneminder as both a way to save a lot of money on software, and because I think that Open Source is much better anyhow. I currently run a very small Zoneminder installation at home, with a USB camera, which is what piqued his interest.

So I'm down to a question of hardware.

He needs 5 cameras right now, though he may add another later. None of them have to be PTZ cameras at the moment, and he doesn't want to spend a TON of money.

Does anyone have recommendations for an easy to set up (i.e. works in zoneminder without too much fiddling with scripts and such) card, and an idea of what kind of computer I will need to put together?

I'm imagining with 5+ cameras, he would need a decent amount of CPU power and memory, and the cameras would preferably be wired.

Could anyone help me with a base idea of computer, and some relatively cheap cameras? Will need a good working capture card that doesn't require a lot of fiddling with Ubuntu server (if you can recommend a better distro, I'm ears)


I'd appreciate any help! Thank you in advance!

[Flasheart]

One of the cheap HP servers gives good bang for buck - ml112 or ml115, both would power this number of cameras well.

I'd go the ip cam route personally, but whatever floats your boat. Axis are the best but very expensive. There are 50$us ip cams that do ok, and plenty of choice in the middle. Just check they'll work with zm before you order.

[Liath]

The problem with Axis cameras is that they are more expensive than what he's able to afford.
I figured I would put together a computer myself (that I am fairly competent at) to meet his needs while leaving some room for improvement, without going overboard. I guess I could go check the specs on that server and see if I can put together a comparable system in terms of hardware.

The reason I'd thought of using general CCTV cameras is that they are much cheaper. Is there a good middle ground? IP cameras seem to be either expensive or to not work properly with Zoneminder -- or require a whole lot of fiddling around with the operating system's files, or building Zoneminder from source, which is something I'd never done myself.

I know he'll need 2 indoor cameras, and then 3 outdoor cameras. Has anyone found any relatively cheap cameras that they have set up and running without a lot of hassle?

Again, thank you very much!

[vraa]

I use Axis and Foscam

Axis is more expensive

Foscam has more features, I only use Axis for specific purposes, I prefer Foscam because of PTZ and cheaper in $$$

I went IP cameras exclusively because how simple setup is

I build my own machines, throw on Ubuntu and work some magic

Cannot beat the price of a custom rolled solution
Basically I find cheapest reasonable AMD quadcore with high tier mobo (with everything on it), kingston hyperx 4gb ram, 2x2tb consumer drives (1 drive for ZM, other one holds daily videos encoded with a script you can find from the forums), cheap case, high quality psu, 6-9 foscam 8918s with POE injectors, trendnet gigabit switches, cyberpower UPSes and that's about it
Before deployment all hardware goes through burnin/stress test to identify most part failures. RAID isn't used because SMART errors or failed drives can easily be swapped out and replaced. All off site locations are within 500mi. Slowest links I have are Sprint 3G cards, fastest links I have are 10mbit. You can obviously speedtest.net or dslreports.com and find out what your down and up caps are.

At HQ we use a ZFS backed ZM box which records all the offsite cameras at 1fps
This enables us to really not have to worry too much about long-term storage solutions, 10x2tb in RAID2Z (with zfsguru - bsd and zfs) ends up with 18tb of useable space with compression, etcetcetc