I'm trying to decide which camera to buy, so have been doing some research.
But there are a few questions I couldn't find answers for in the documentation — maybe someone here knows?
Also: I describe my situation a little more at the bottom, if anyone has general recommendations.
(1) When specifying FTP upload, can I input a hostname rather than IP address, for the destination server? All of the documentation only mentions IP addresses, but I wasn't sure if that's a requirement or just was simpler to write it that way.
I do see in some of the user manuals, for the "server address" field, the description: "Server Address: This field allows the user to designate a DDNS address for the FTP server." That would indicate a host name (no point in DDNS if it's a numeric IP address), but I'm confused what the actual situation is.
Anyone have hands-on experience with that?
(2) How do I know if a given camera supports SFTP versus plain FTP? For instance, I found this article which seems specific to the "IP5M-T1179E-28MM" camera. But if I look at the corresponding user manual, there is no mention of SFTP, only plain FTP. I guess it depends on the firmware? Seems hard to know in advance.
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Generally, here's my situation: I want to install a camera which will send some motion-activated footage back to my home server. The camera will be in a nursing home, on their network. I do not have control of that network, so I cannot do port forwarding or any typical "remote access" stuff. So, I would like the camera to simply push those videos to my server.
(Side question: are there cameras that support creating a SSL tunnel, allowing normal remote access even through a NAT I don't control? I know it can be done, but haven't seen mention of something like that)
Thus, I am looking at FTP (ideally SFTP) to do that.
However, my home server does not have a static IP address. It has a stable dynamic DNS host name, though. So, ideally the camera would use that hostname as its destination, and it should all work fine.
Note: I'm aware of various "cloud" solutions, and I explicitly want to avoid them. I want to control the software and hardware involved as much as I reasonably can. I also do not want to use any apps — ideally only web interfaces built into the camera itself.
The amount of hassle with off-the-shelf solutions makes me juuusttt about ready to build something with a Raspberry Pi myself to avoid all the BS, but I'm trying to get something done quickly and easily. It's just for a temporary situation.
Thanks!
-John