Set Up Your Own Camera Surveillance System On The Cheap ~ Bauer-Power Media

Sep 12, 2012

Set Up Your Own Camera Surveillance System On The Cheap

10:00 AM

Paul B

A little over a year ago I worked for a consulting and hosting firm in downtown San Diego. The company's main job was consulting on Microsoft SharePoint deployments, but they also did SharePoint hosting as well. What does hosting mean? It means data centers.

Well, we had recently moved from one data center in town to another one and after the move we had a couple of outages. These seemed to be stemmed from power failures at the data center, and during one episode I went to the colo and found a couple of data center electricians working in our cage. Now I'm not sure these guys had anything to do with the outage, but I reported it to my boss at the time and he being the epic douche that he was, was looking for someone to blame to get the executives off his back.

My douchy boss started raising hell with the people at our colo and demanded to know who was in our cage, and for some reason the folks at the data center couldn't identify the workers in our cage at that time. Needless to say it wasn't long after that my boss had my colleague who used to install surveillance cameras install a couple in our cage so we could see who was coming and going.

Now I still think my boss at the time is a douche, but he did have a good idea. The thing is, we could have done it a whole lot cheaper. In fact, we could have done it for probably less than $15. Let me explain.

I found a free cloud based service that offers video surveillance over the internet. All you have to do is have one or more webcams, then you download their free software and sign up with an account. The service is called Ivideon. I say the setup is less than $15 because I found this webcam on Amazon for a little over $5.00. If you bought two of them, which is how many we had in our cage, you would be set!

You can check out some demos of their setup here: (Ivideon Demo)

Another cool feature of Ivideon, besides that it is free, is that they also have free apps for the iPhone and for Android so you can keep an eye on things no matter where you go!

I think I'm going to take my old douchy boss's idea and setup a surveillance system in my cabinet, and server room at my new gig. I mean in the world of network security, you can never be too careful. The only difference is that it won't cost me an arm and a leg.