Surveillance, home networking

Hello, the last video on the pfsense router, added with me moving has peaked my interest in either building a router out of a old Dell pc I have or buying one. I also plan on incorporating a surveillance system, my thought were either use a riser card to attach more hard drives to record with and possibly a NAS or buy a Linksys wrt1900ac router. Witch ever route I take the pc will be use for the cameras and I plan on using a 8 or 12 port router with poe. How difficult would it be to use a unmanaged switch versus a managed one? I'm only considering this due to I can purchase a switch with poe ports that is unmanaged vs.a managed one. Also I'd like for this system to not have access to the internet so I would need to set up a VLAN (I believe I'm using this term correctly) but is it possible to only allow access to my phone so I can see a live feed remotely? I hope y'all can understand what I'm getting at as I'm fairly new to all this, any and all recommendations and or critiques are welcome.

If this helps these are the items I plan on buying.





Edit: I found this switch and seems like it would be better due to it being managed and having more poe ports.

Pfsense will be far more versatile and useful than any off the shelf router/firewall.

I use a pfsense box for my primary router for wan, lan and WiFi APs. My security network is a separate tp-link router attached to the pfsence box. This keeps all camera traffic off the lan. The 1080 cameras will saturate a network pretty quick which subnets and v-lans won't help.

Your wan facing router is where you allow/deny internet traffic to the security equipment. Vlans would be a way to separate lan/WiFi/security traffic that reside on the same switch.

Here is another thread with a bunch of info in it as well about a variety of home surveillance stuff:

1 Like

The only problem I've noticed with using pf is that the extra pc I have has 1 sata port, 1 pcie 16x )gen 2 ?) and a pci slot. With that I feel like I'm limited due to expansion, I could use this,http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5EM3N86911&cm_re=riser_card--9SIA5EM3N86911--Product
and ribbon cable to allow for a nic and a sata adapter. It would be janky but it would work right? I planned on getting a switch to take care of the cameras.

I may be confused but are you thinking of using the same machine to record and store the video? Pfsense doesn't have the capability. You need separate machines to run a router and NVR.

Yea that's what I thought and why I was gonna buy the router and a switch.