Our macOS CCTV software SecuritySpy allows you to set up an effective video surveillance system of any size, in both home and commercial settings.
The simplest setup for a LAN (Local Area Network) that includes IP cameras is to have a central Ethernet switch with all devices, including the cameras, connected to it. This generally works well, and has the advantage that every device can talk to every other device, which helps when setting up new devices. However, there are some potential downsides with this configuration:
- Performance: at the Mac’s Ethernet port, camera traffic can be significant, and it can slow down other network data transfers to the Mac.
- Privacy: some cameras “phone home”, sending data of unknown content back to the manufacturer’s servers. While the content of this data is probably benign (e.g. business/diagnostic information), some users worry about private data being sent.
- Security: some cameras automatically make themselves available from the Internet; automated bots will find the cameras, and will attempt to hack into them.
The above can be mitigated to some extent by changing camera settings, and the Ethernet speed for the Mac can be increased by using a faster link speed (e.g. 2.5 Gbps) or link aggregation. However, if you are sufficiently concerned by the above issues, the ultimate solution is to segregate the IP cameras onto their own, separate, LAN. This has the following advantages:
- Camera traffic is completely separate and does not impact the general LAN in any way.
- Cameras do not have Internet access, so cannot send data to the Internet.
- Cameras cannot make themselves available from the Internet, so hacking into them becomes impossible.
The main downside of this configuration is that the setup is more difficult, and does require some knowledge of IP addressing. If you are unfamiliar with this topic, we would advise you to research how IP addresses work on local networks before proceeding.
An example setup is as follows:
