BUILD help looking for dual nic and ip cam

[w1n78]

hello, i'd like to add a dual nic card but not sure what would work. would the pro1000 work? i see plenty used ones on ebay at a good price. quad port would be nice but may be over kill unless there's a good price as well. i currently am using the onboard nic and it works fine but as i grow in activity, i'd like to make sure my transfer speed continues to stay high. so i'm more wanting the performance than the redundancy.

also any suggestions on ip cameras. i'd like to start with 2-3 and max at 5-6. would prefer for it to have wifi. planning to have 2 outdoor and 1 indoor. it's for house not a business. just starting out and wanna get my feet wet. does freenas have software that'll handle the recording and saving? any resources you can link to?

here's my hardware

• i7-2600k
• asus z68v-pro
• 16gb ram
• 5x4TB raidz2

my current hardware should be good enough, right? thanks for the input.

 

[marbus90]

well, I remember those systems from 4 years ago. were nice for gamers, but not for FreeNAS (altough it has an Intel NIC onboard, applause). the bandwidth is fine over a single port with sequential speed, but as soon as multiple devices are accessing it (even via more/bigger pipes) the speed drops to below 1Gbe -> multiple ports and LAGGing wouldn't help.

Pull that finger outta yer nose and instead click https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/ ;)

 

[danb35]

FreeNAS doesn't have anything built-in to handle recording/saving/indexing from cameras. Zoneminder seems to be one popular piece of software to handle this, and it can be installed either in a VM under Linux, or in a jail using a FreeBSD port. Or, if you're setting up VMs anyway, you can set one up with whatever OS you want and use whatever other software you want.

 

[w1n78]

thanks for the response

@marbus90 i didn't see or notice anything about NIC other than onboard so i'm assuming if i want to add more NIC, go with intel?

@danb35 so any IP cam should work since i have to run an OS in a VM to run it anyway, right?

 

[Darren Myers]

depending on the situation, you could make a VM, install a OS, install the camera software and then point the software to FreeNAS of where to save the video(s) that are recorded

 

[danb35]

...or install the VirtualBox guest extensions and use the shared folders to accomplish the same thing.

 

[Darren Myers]

...or install the VirtualBox guest extensions and use the shared folders to accomplish the same thing.

didnt even know that was an option, good to know!

 

[danb35]

I'm honestly not sure which is the "better" way to do it. If you mount a dataset as storage to the virtualbox jail, then use the shared folders feature to expose that as a volume to the guest OS, you're going through a couple of layers of virtualization to make that volume appear, and no doubt each of those layers takes some amount of a performance penalty, but it doesn't expose anything to your network. OTOH, if you export the dataset as a network share and then mount it with in the guest OS, you go through different software layers, and you expose that share on your LAN.

My gut says that the shared folders option will be faster, but I have absolutely no data to back that up, and I really have no idea about stability. I'm using the shared folders method with my installation of Zoneminder though.

 

[danb35]

@danb35 so any IP cam should work since i have to run an OS in a VM to run it anyway, right?

Then it would be up to the OS and cam software in question. If you use software that only supports certain cams, of course you wouldn't expect other cams to be supported.