Question - it might exist already

[Kevin Greene]

Hello People.

I am located in the USA and I would like to install a remote camera in Thailand to watch some turtles (yes, a bit weird...). I currently use Amcrest cameras (with a lot of Firewall rules and DNS spoofing to block the "phone home" issue) as they are very reliable so far (most over 3-5 years old on some).

I am looking for a way for a camera in Thailand to "push" video to a ZoneMinder server in the USA. The Thailand network is a private network (192.168.0.x) so I am unable to directly access the edge router at the Thai end. That router also uses DHCP on the public network interface towards a local ISP so that does not help either.

The perfect solution would be for the client camera to connect on its own to my ZoneMinder server in the USA (New Orleans). Thus if there was a power outage (very common) or there was a DHCP ip change on the client router or the client camera, it would still connect to the US located server. It would even be great if it could be done over a TLS connection. I have heard that the Thai government is sometimes concerned about running a VPN to another country.

The other challenge is that my hone network does have a fixed IP and I could open a hole in the firewall, I was thinking if we could proxy the connection from my external server to my home. Thus the ZoneMinder system I have at home (monitoring ~30+ cameras) which is well behind two network layers would connect to the external Server in New Orleans. It would best if I could use the local ZoneMinder at my home to query the "proxy ZoneMinder" in the external data center. Again TLS would be useful for this but I do have a VPN from my home to the data center firewall.

This is something like a Amcrest cloud service but as we all know, that is very unsecure. It could be that other cameras allow you to create your own cloud service provider. Amcrest cameras do support FTP to a NAS but that connection is not secure (no encryption).

Any suggestions would be useful. I know this is a lot to ask.

Thank you.

[dougmccrary]

I'm probably missing something, but anyway...

AFAIK, we normally pull cameras, so seems to me the primary issue would be solved by DDNS at Thailand.

[Kevin Greene]

Yes. I do understand that we currently pull camera video - I do it a lot.
But some cameras are capable of being a client and will connect on their own to a system capable of accepting a connection.
So what I am understanding from you, Zoneminder is not capable of of accepting connections. It can only create connections to obtain video.

Thanks. This will help. I will go a different direction then.

Cheers.

Kevin

[dougmccrary]

I might be wrong -

But some cameras are capable of being a client

I was not aware of that. You could probably set up a server to accept, and then let zm connect there...

Anyway, good luck with it.