this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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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 :)

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[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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 9 months 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.