Personal Home Security with Xeoma and my UnRaid Home Server

For some, life can be scary… and for others it can be an adventure, but for my wife it is a constant struggle for the peace of mind that the person knocking on the door is more friend than foe. For this reason, I have been slowly building a home server system that can help bring that peace of mind.

I am not by trade in the IT field and depend on YouTube videos way too often to figure things out, that’s why I try to find options that meet my needs without breaking my budget. I have looked at the free options out there that were more confusing than I had the patience to learn… This left me with the expensive windows based platforms that gave you some “free” options but drained the system with resource requirements that just wouldn’t work well for me.

Seeing that my server was built on the Debian based UnRaid Home Server platform and the Docker Container environment, I started digging for a docker to answer my needs… and this search led me to Xeoma and its feature rich platform that was not a resource hog like others I had tried out.

After installing the Xeoma Container on to my system, I started exploring how Xeoma interacted with my generic IP cameras and the options Xeoma offered with them. I found that the video quality was far better than what I expected. From here, I started adding my cameras into the dashboard with practically no problems.

After getting everything working the way I wanted, I started to wonder how far I can build my system with all the spare parts laying around the house. I first started with installing the IOS app on our phones so that we can have peace of mind while away from home. After watching a video on YouTube about home security systems, I got to thinking about mounting a video screen at my front door, so that we could see who was at the door… So I grabbed the only spare monitor I had laying about and my Raspberry Pi 3 and got started on mounting my equipment at my front door.

Though my wife was skeptical at first, she found the idea comforting that she could now see who was at the door much easier than on the tiny screen of our phones or even the almost impossible peephole we have currently.

Security has always been the top of my todo list because of the crazy world we live in now, and being able to bring peace of mind to the ones I love through video surveillance systems allows me to work away from home and know that they are also at peace.

This experience has opened new avenues for me to explore and to help others build a video system that will bring them the same experience that I have been able to have without being nickeled and dimed for every little thing.

July, 25 2018