this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
62 points (97.0% liked)

Selfhosted

51838 readers
613 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello selfhosters!

I have what is hopefully a simple ask. I am looking for some outdoor cameras for my sister, who is not at all tech savvy. I am, to an extent, and I'd like to get her set up with a small, remotely-manageable system to view and record the outside of her home. I'd wager there's a plethora of selfhost software that can be run on a number of systems (I'm thinking something cheap like a Raspberry Pi), to connect to an external HDD for camera storage.

I'm also looking for camera suggestions for this purpose. Wi-Fi cameras are ideal, since we don't have the means to run ethernet for PoE.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you all have a wonderful week :)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You need a firewall and optimally a separate wifi network for this kind of thing, because they pretty much all call home. I’m happy enough with Reolink, but mine are PoE. I haven’t set up a NVR for them, just scrypted -> HomeKit Secure Video. I don’t know if you can set up the Reolink NVR in a secure fashion, and get notifications etc.

Because you want outside of home availability, self hosting now means punching a hole in the firewall for VPN or implementing Cloudflare tunnels or Tailscale or something. That’s where the handy cloudy apps come in.

[–] marighost@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

I specified locally hosted/managed because we'd like to avoid clouds and subscriptions. I don't really want to divulge details but this is mostly for home security against a specific individual, and this person might be inclined to attempt logins into a cloud service. From my end I'd just set up a wireguard tunnel and us it to remote into some kind of server/NVR at my sister's house.