Big Brother Farm

This project is about securing and wiring up a big farm. A quite large farm in northern Europe recently became my reponsibility. My first task is to secure it as I am not there every day. First step is to use security cameras etc. Second step is to improve the setup. Third step is to setup a fully autonomous drone surveillance system where drones take off on their own and land to charge. This takes inspiration from the cold war when Americans always had at least one B-52 airborne. Anyway, let's get back to step one which is described on this page. There are a thousand and one pieces to this project so this might take a while...

Ingredients:

Raspberry Pi scripts etc:

Command and control server scripts:

Home base Raspberry Pi:

Mobile device:

Current network topology:

Things that don't seem to work:

Syncthing woes section:
As mentioned before I'm using Syncthing for sending photos and other data to the devices and computers elsewhere. Syncthing is great when it works but when it doesn't work it really sucks and causes problems.

My rapid update folder with images from the last hour gets errors all the time. The Syncthing dashboard also claims that it is "Out of sync" and "isn't making progress" but there is no clear reason for this. The folder still works somehow and usually has images from roughly the last hour in it. I have a bash script on the master server deleting any images that are older than an hour and in that folder (apparently this is why Syncthing goes haywire).

My most recent problem is this: images from random days from the last month just won't go away. Deleting them on all the devices doesn't help. They just keep coming back!

Also checking the list of "out of sync files" from the Syncthing dashboard shows a bunch of files from last month that are "being synced". Thanks to my bash script those files should no longer exist! Currently my devices are eternally trying to sync a backlog of 70000+ non existing files and counting!

I have come to the conclusion that a faster folder rescan interval would probably remove these issues but that setting doesn't work well either. No matter what you change the folder rescan interval to.. it will always revert back to 3600 seconds!

Also the exclusion of MacOS .DS_Store files through folder settings doesn't work. They just keep on reappearing. And yes, I have tried excluding old files such as cam1-201806*.jpg - It works but stops all others files from being synced too.

Yes, I am running the latest version as Syncthing auto updates itself. At least that works.

Problems solved:

Security impact so far: