First step with cameras... and further planning to be done

After my incident last week, I immediately went up to Automated Outlet and ended up buying two of their Panasonic IP cameras (a huge thanks to Martin). The cameras themselves were pretty easy to set up (one in the kitchen, one in the living room to check up on motion sensor alerts), and they come with their own http servers so they can be accessed over the internet. However, since my HomeSeer site is already using port 80, I set up the cameras to use ports 52 and 54 (quite randomly, I assure you). Unfortunatley, these ports are blocked by my firewall at work, so I can't even view the cameras at work. I'm working with a security guy at work to set up VNC over SSH so I can view the cameras appropriately, but that will probably take a couple of days. In the meantime, my wife can view the cameras from her office, and I can access them with my cell phone since they have special built-in access for phones as well.

I must say, although the camera setup was fairly easy, the installation took some creative planning, due to the lack of wiring in my house. The camera in the living room (across the house from the office where the server is) is hooked up to a Netgear wireless print server which happened to have 4 ethernet ports as well. The camera in the kitchen is using ethernet over the powerlines. So far, the one in the kitchen has a faster refresh rate, and the ethernet over the powerlines doesn't seem to be interfering with UPB communications at all.

Also, this weekend is another meeting of the North Texas Home Automation Users Group, and I'll be taking plans of the house up there to see what we can do about wiring the home for security purposes. This has been just a terrible week (capped off by my 2-year-old daughter hitting me in the nuts last night), and I'd like to get it behind me as quickly as possible.