Tag: Security

Dec 14

What’s the Difference Between Security and Distribution Groups?

What is the difference between an Active Directory Security Group and a Distribution Group?

Distribution Groups – These are used for email distribution. Let’s say we have a group called “Sales” and there are 50 users in that group. We need to send an email to all of them at once. How do we accomplish that? We’d use a distribution group. Within Active Directory, you’d create a group, we’ll call it sales, and add all your sales users to that group. Now when you want to send out a blast email to your entire sales team, you would use a single email address like sales@testcompany.com
Additionally, groups can also be updated as users come and go. This helps keep things organized for you, as an Active Directory administrator, as well as your end users. 
Security Groups – Security groups have a similar concept to that of distribution groups except that they are used to secure a network resource instead of sending out an email message. Again, lets pretend we have a sales department at Test Company. Test Company has a file server with a shared folder called sales. Only the sales department should have access to this folder. How would you accomplish this? 
You could add all of your sales users to the folder individually but that would be extremely messy. You’d have to adjust permissions every time someone left or started at Test Company. Not an efficient way of doing things. So instead, you would create a security group and assign the group permissions to the folder. Let’s call it the Sales-RW group. We know from looking at it, that the group is Sales, and they have Read-Write (RW) access if they are in that group. Now when someone starts or leaves your company, you update the group and the permissions on the folder stay the same. This is a much cleaner way of doing things.

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Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2019/12/14/whats-the-difference-between-security-and-distribution-groups/

Jan 30

Feeding Ubiquiti Cameras into Blue Iris

Background

When it comes to security cameras, I have pretty much been an advocate for anything Ubiquiti. Especially when there is a budget to work with. Their cameras are fairly good quality for a decent price. Ubiquiti also includes their NVR software free of charge. I, personally, have had great success with the above mentioned software. Some hiccups here and there, but nothing major to write home about. That being said, lately I have had the desire…the want… for something more out of my home camera/NVR system that Ubiquiti does not offer at this time. A great addition to my system would be a couple of PTZs.

For those of you who do not know what a PTZ camera is, it stands for, Pan, Tilt and Zoom. This allows the user to move the camera about instead of having it in a fixed position.

In order to pull this off and add some PTZs to my network of cameras, I had to come up with a different NVR solution. This is where Blue Iris comes into play. I knew I could not replace all of my Ubiquiti cameras and really had no need to. However, I needed a solution that would play nice with them. Something else Ubiquiti is not exactly known for.

I purchased a copy of Blue Iris for $60 and installed it on my home server.

Purchase BlueIris here

Steps to take

I then began to remove my Ubiquiti cameras from the Ubiquiti NVR software by using the “unmange” option. Once all of the cameras were out of the Ubiquiti NVR, I then logged into each camera and set them to “Standalone” mode. This allows them to send an RTSP feed. Blue Iris can then receive the RTSP feed. 

Once you have put the camera into “Standalone” mode, it will reboot.

You can now launch Blue Iris and add the camera to it. You will need your RTSP URL and port number. In this case, it is 192.168.35.101:554

Within the Blue Iris Admin Console, right click anywhere and select “Add new camera” from the popup menu.

A dialogue box will appear. Give your new camera a Full Name and a Short Name.

Under “Type” make sure it is set to “Network IP”

On the “Options” section, I chose to enable all 3. These are optional, you may pick whatever options fit your situation.

When you are satisfied with the settings, click on the “Ok” button. A new dialogue box will appear. Here you will want to leave the first drop down as “http://” and then enter the IP and port number of the camera. So in my case, 192.168.35.101:554. The “Make” will be “Generic” and the model will be “RTSP H.264/H.265/MJPG/MPEG4. Under the “Video” section, set “Path” as “/s0”, Audio Format can be set to “64kbps G.711 u-law”

I left the additional settings alone. Something I am trying to get working in the future is to require a username/password for the RTSP feed. Currently I have left those blank. From my research, Ubiquiti does not seem to support that as an option with Blue Iris at this time. I am ok with this as my cameras are on a separate VLAN on my home network.

Go ahead and click “Ok” – You should now be able to see your Ubiquiti camera within Blue Iris.

 

Now that I have my Ubiquiti cameras working within Blue Iris, I can go ahead and any other type of camera to my system, this includes PTZs.

 


 

Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/01/30/feeding-ubiquiti-cameras-into-blue-iris/

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