this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Privacy
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Peanut gallery here but I have a couple questions about IP cameras and what the recommended setup exactly looks like. If you or someone else could answer them it would be greatly appreciated.
You were saying in your first comment that you would recommend getting one of the infamous 10 year old servers with redundant power supplies specifically for this. On said server:
a. How much RAM would you recommend to start? Most of those servers still use DDR3/4 so it shouldn't be too god awfully expensive.
b. What OS setup would you recommend? Ubuntu Server/CLI Debian, or something like adding the server to a Proxmox cluster and running a resource-heavy VM with GPU and HDD pass through?
As far as the client end of the monitoring stack, would you recommend a Raspberry Pi with a cheap-ish monitor that acts as a dedicated client for this, or an open port or firewall rule which allows a web client to be accessible via the rest of your LAN?
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!
I would recommend you think critically about what you’re trying to accomplish first and foremost then implement the simplest system that has the fewest points of failure.