My official position at Christ’s Church of Mandarin (Jacksonville, FL) is Security Director. This includes managing the non-business-hours security hosts, the magnetic lock doors and ID badge system, managing locking and unlocking, following up on security issues, and handling the security cameras.
For our cameras we use primarily D-Link cameras: DCS-1000w, DCS-900w, and DCS-3220g. Below, I will describe some of our setup and innovations on the basic system.
The 1000w and 3220g both share a similar casing while the 900W looks more like a pop can.
Mounted 900w and 3220g
1000w and 900w in size comparison
We currently use the official D-Link IPView (1000w) and IPView Lite (900w) software for most of the video recording. The two computers below handle most of the cameras (with the exception of the 3220g systems which aren’t as convenient to just toss into a back room.
Two computers displaying some of the cameras. The monitor on the left is a 21inch CRT from 1997. Nobody wants it cluttering their desks anymore, so I figured it would be best where it is turned off most of the time.
One of the nice things about this system is that the cameras have built in web servers so they can be managed and viewed from a regular web browser. I took this system and adapted it to allow us to watch the cameras from most computers in the building, primarily the front desk.
This image shows the dual monitor setup at the church’s front entrance where the receptionist sits during office hours and where the security hosts sit after hours when not walking their rounds.
The camera web page loads a still image from each of the cameras and then refreshes them at regular intervals. I have the refreshing staggered so that there is a 3 second break between each camera refreshing when it starts. The user can select 30 second, 1 minute, 5 minute, or 10 minute refresh intervals or a live java feed. This means that cameras where there is a lot of action going on can go by live feed without being crowded in the bandwidth with a locked dark room where nobody is supposed to be.
The cameras are also linked to the recording computers mentioned above. The recording is motion activated and drops the video files into different directories for each camera. I have installed Apache w/ PHP on the recording computers so I can easily serve the recorded AVI files through the above web interface. This allows to security hosts to quickly review something that was recently caught on video.
I have some plans that I am currently working on right now:
- An AJAX style drag and drop system for customizing the web based viewing
- DNS settings to make the cameras more easily accessible
- Modifying the listening ports and opening the firewall to make the cameras accessible over the internet (password protected of course)
- Finding better recording software to replace the default offered by D-Link. I will post about that in the near future.
There is a little bit of my world. Fun Fun Fun 
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