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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.

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+1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed.

My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.

Thanks. You've answered my question about Home Assistant. I'm not familiar with Reolink and will give them a look.

I have a Wyze camera and their janky HA integration seems to have stopped working after a firmware update. They're also the epitome of enshittification and want to nickel and dime me for every feature -- I'd be glad to ditch them.

> LAN only, no centralized cloud server.

Until one day they auto-update ...

Cameras (like other iot devices) should be forbidden from going outside LAN.

How do you deal with your smartphone camera(s)?

Are you asking outside the context of the home surveillance cams? just whether it's possible to prevent backdoors to your iphone camera?

IME you have no control over the baseband chip of a cell phone, no reason to trust it's not enabling its camera or microphone at any time. I have a flip phone which comes in a non-camera version. I have an iphone without a SIM I can connect to its hotspot if I need to do something smartphoney.

Yes, I'm asking outside the context of home surveillance. I'm just curious how "paranoid" people deal with smartphones. I'm paranoid myself, but I'm also lazy ...

As a paranoid and lazy person, I just pick my battles. No amount of fiddling with hardware security keys and secure computing is a reasonable protection against rubber hose cryptography.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I have a separate VLAN with its own WiFi SSID for iot things like cameras, sensors, washing machine, dryer, solar panels and a bunch of ESP32 based projects. It has no internet access, and is only accessible from my home automation server. Those devices really only need to send data to Home Assistant and expose some basic APIs to it.

I take a simpler approach and block such devices in the router. This is a bit riskier as devices may in theory change their MAC address.

How do you handle smartphone cameras?

Can you use the app to talk to someone at the door if it’s LAN only?

As far as I've tried, it's fully functional if you VPN into your LAN.

Sorry for bugging you about this. I'm not the person you are responding to but this is important to me before buying so if you don't mind, could you verify that this is your setup?

1. The doorbell cam is connected only to the LAN.

2. The doorbell cam is definitely blocked from accessing the internet.

3. Having access to the LAN from your phone through VPN allows you to watch the feed and talk to people at the door through the app.

1. Correct

2. I have not gone through the trouble of isolating them on their own VLAN, but I don't see any traffic coming from the devices. This is something you will want to audit on your own network if it is important to you.

3. I have viewed the camera output through VPN, but have not yet tried speaking through the doorbell (or through one of my camera's audio output). I don't see why it would not work.

Thanks for taking the time!

Depending on your technical abilities, you can set up Frigate or maybe Scripted. Or possibly even just the Home Assistant integration. All of these would be self hosted options, accessible only by LAN if that's how you want it.

The Reolink doorbell camera is a typical recommendation and can work fully locally and supports well the common standards like RTSP. 2 way audio works as well.

I believe the NVR Reolink sells can also work fully locally as well. Which also can integrate to home assistant.

My grandparents solved that by putting their mobile phone number on their door. They're slow to come down and open the door so it makes sense for the post person or visitor to know they're on their way

Relatively low tech compared to somehow hooking up a camera livestream system to ring your phone via the internet in some way but it works

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