[Tfug] webcam recommendations

[George Cohn]

Matt Jacob wrote:
> George Cohn wrote:
>> I have one of the Panasonic BB-HCM511A webcams that requires nothing at 
>> all except a network connection.
> 
> Holy crap, that looks awesome. I can think of so many things I'd want to 
> do with one (or ten) of those, but the $400 price tag is a little steep.
> 
> Is PoE pretty reliable? Does it require special hardware (e.g. 
> router/switch) to draw power from, or does it work with all networking gear?
>

Actually the street price is somewhat less at Newegg.com.

It comes with a power supply so you can do the standard wall-wart thing 
or if you have a IEEE 802.3af standards compliant POE device you don't 
need the wall-wart.

In my case, I have a handful of Cisco Aironet power injectors that seem 
to work fine for most POE stuff.

One thing you want to watch out for is many of the "consumer grade" POE 
switches that have a handful of POE ports don't actually have a stiff 
enough power supply to support powering devices from all of their POE 
ports at the same time.

POE is pretty much a desired requirement if you are powering things like 
VoIP phones and security cameras from a data closet as you can plug 
everything into a UPS and ensure some measure of operation during a TEP 
outage.

When I worked in health care, we had POE and network stuff on UPS's 
backed up by electrical outlets that were attached to standby generators 
that automatically transferred when the utility power burped.

You pay *extra* for that kind of uptime reliability.  ;-)

George Cohn