Kathi from the Bread of Life, our food pantry, Benefit Bank, commodities distribution, and government assistance distribution asked me to look into some video surveillance for their building. Many people are in and out of the space and they want to be able to keep an eye on things. Not so much for stealing (because they GIVE everything away anyway) but for ensure that what they think they have is actually there. Sadly, some people still choose to take things.
I chose to go with an IP camera since it could be incorporated to our existing system without much trouble. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of them come with their own web-server software. This is important for remote monitoring. I eventually settled on the Sharx SCNC2607 from SecurCam. Some of the highlights include:
- Night Vision
- Motion Detection
- 640×480 @ 30FPS
- Wired and wireless
Setup would be difficult for a novice user. Knowledge of DHCP, UPnP, NAT, Ports, Firewalls, and 802.11 setup were helpful. One thing that was extra handy was Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). After enabling this feature on the pfGuard, the Sharx grabbed an IP and then was recognized within Vista showing the IP. I didn’t have to log into the firewall and check for the most recent lease. Although the wording in the manual makes it sound difficult, it was easy to configure the ports and know which ports to forward through our firewall. I chose to pull the MAC address and set up a static lease on the pfGuard so that it keeps the same IP.
Other handy settings allow for motion detection within zones (areas of the shot), alert settings (I chose email from a pop enabled gmail account), resolution, frame rates, and bandwidth for web streaming. I went for quality since our WAN from Cox Business is strong.
Sharx also provides MultiLive software that installs on a client. This allows you to not only monitor a number of cameras either simultaneously or individually but it also allows you to establish your recording drive and determine the length of recording time after an alarm has been triggered. A feature I didn’t use was the included SD card slot. I simply don’t have one laying around.
Hopefully this will give us an idea of where our missing product is going. Not so much to bust them, but to open the door to serve another client at the Bread of Life.