I used to use Dogpile a lot in the late 1990s. Coincidentally it was a similar idea to this and SearxNG - it was a meta search engine that combined Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista and a few others into one interface (no Google since it wasn’t in widespread use yet).

It’s not like gtk3 is suddenly out of use.

That’s true, however the GNOME maintainers will drop support for it at some point. I guess Cinnamon or xfce could maintain their own forks, however the majority of apps target what GNOME is currently using given it’s the most popular desktop environment.

I’m not familiar with this app, but what do you mean “gnomed”? Do you mean the UI started using Gtk4 and Adwaita components?

Gtk3 is considered legacy now, so most apps that use Gtk will be transitioning to Gtk4 (and Adwaita) at some point. Gtk3 is starting to look a bit outdated in modern DEs.

A lot of these devices are Ethernet-only to simplify things. Ethernet is more reliable, people that use KVM/IPMI for remote management usually use it via Ethernet, and it means they don’t need to bundle wifi drivers with their OS. Also, some of them are powered using PoE (Power over Ethernet) to avoid needing a separate power cable.

You could plug it into a cheap wifi bridge to make it wireless.

How does this differ from every other distribution method, though? You can just as easily do something malicious with an Appimage or Debian/rpm package.

If you want to share something with just some people, they can create a Tailscale account and you can share it with them that way.

For public access, accessing it using a domain that uses your public IP should work. Most routers let you do that (“hairpin NAT”). Although to be honest, most of my public facing things are on a VPS rather than on my home server. More reliable and a higher quality internet connection for a fairly cheap price per month.

third party cameras won’t support detection unless you also add a Unifi AI Port.

Does Unifi not support ONVIF events? Seems like a pretty major missing feature if so. I guess they really do want to lock you into their ecosystem.

Are there security issues specific to Flatpak? I would have thought it’d be more secure than Appimage, since it’s sandboxed.

They already said they’re using Tailscale, so this isn’t needed. They can just use the Tailscale IP everywhere. On LAN it’ll connect over the LAN, and away from home it’ll connect over the internet. It comes with a .ts.net subdomains too.

Use Unraid’s native Tailscale support. Add each Docker container to the Tailnet. You don’t need split horizon DNS when using Tailscale, as the Tailscale IPs will work both on and off your LAN, as long as you’re connected to Tailscale. Don’t use a subnet router. Tailscale is peer-to-peer, so it’s still going to connect directly over your LAN when possible (it won’t route out to the internet then back)

https://unraid.net/tailscale

For TLS, you could use the Tailscale built-in .ts.net subdomains. Should work out-of-the-box. Otherwise, to use your own domain, f you can’t get access to Namecheap’s API you could run acme-dns instead.

Looks like an interesting project!

Could you please consider publishing it to Flathub?

On Android, I use ytdlnis, which is a wrapper around yt-dlp. You can “share” a video from to YouTube app to ytdlnis and it’ll add it to the download queue.

How long do you want to store footage for? With 6 cameras at 8Mbps each, you’d get less than two days of video on a 1TB drive. You could drop the bitrate quite a bit if you use H265 instead of H264, but it’s still not a huge amount of storage.

Several manufacturers have sites to determine how much storage you’d need based on number of cameras, bit rate and how long you want to store the videos for. Just use any of those to get a rough estimate. Personally I’d recommend a 10TB or larger WD Purple Pro, since it has 512MB cache instead of 256MB.

For the doorbell, I’d use a proper doorbell cam that can use the existing wires for power. Reolink’s wifi one comes with an adapter to use it with existing wiring.

The Unifi cameras don’t support ONVIF, so you’re essentially locked into their ecosystem, and it’d be difficult to use them with a different NVR if you ever want to switch. Maybe that’s OK for your use case though.

Of course.

Resize your Windows partition to be smaller, then install Linux in the newly-freed space. You can boot into GParted to resize the partition.

If you have enough space for it, just keep it in the PC.

Since you’re using Hetzner, one option is to get a Hetzner storage box to store the media. 1TB space is $4/month (not sure about EU pricing). You can mount the storage on another system via NFS.

On-disk cache prevents a “thundering herd” problem when you reboot - an in-memory cache would be empty on rebootz whereas an on-disk cache survives a reboot. Linux handles caching files in RAM automatically.

they can be uploaded to S3 (object storage) where it is 10x cheaper to store them

This is heavily dependent on the VPS. Some of my VPSes are cheaper than object storage would be.

RAM is a good idea. You could put the cache in /dev/shm.

Anything loaded from disk is going to be cached in RAM anyways.

Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.