Surveillance Station

By default, each Synology product ships with a license for one camera. If you want to use more than one camera, you’ll have to purchase additional licenses for $50.00/camera. This seems a bit stingy, considering that the DS508 sells for around $1000!

The number of cameras supported varies with the product.  With its faster processor and 512 MB of memory, the DS508 can support up to 10 cameras.  Lower end products support as few as 1 camera.  Yet my DS107+ with 128 MB of memory can handle 5.

For my tests, I set up the Panasonic BL-C1A camera provided by Synology.  (Available online for less than $100).  I installed the Panasonic software – primarily to discover the IP address of the camera and to set the camera name and password.  While the Pansonic camera includes a nice application, you don’t use it at all.  All of the management is done through the Synology Surveillance Station interface. 

To set up the Surveillance Station, you just enable it in the DSM 2.0 interface.  Enabling the service automatically creates a share named \surveillance. Files are stored on this share in directories named for each camera.

To set up the camera, you merely fill in a camera name, the IP address and select the camera model from a drop down list (Figure 4).  Then you enter the admin name/password for the camera.  When you test the camera for the first time, an active X component will install in your browser to allow for viewing.

Figure 4: Camera Setup for the Surveillance Station

Under Options, you set the folder name, archive retention and maximum size to be used by the archive.  You can also enable motion detection and set motion detection sensitivity.

Figure 5: Set Camera Options

For this test, I set the camera to monitor my front door.  I set the trigger area to trip on motion along the entrance walkway to my front door (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Setting motion detection trigger area

Tags: BYOD, NAS, RAID, Synology,

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