Listning to this, it seems to me that I should wire the new house at the farm for cameras and alarms to cover my lanes of fire, at least. Seems like I need to know when we have Indians coming through the corn or VC in the wire. The shop building already has IR cameras and recorders with motion detectors, I guess I will need to expand the system from the sound of this.
Ed

If you are interested in Milestone Xprotect, they have a free product to try as an NVR. I am a rep for them if you want one of their higher end products. Shoot me a pm if interested, but I can help you out for my cost. Hikvision and Dahua are solid for poe cameras. LTS security is a hikvision oem. Contact Milkisbad on ipcamtalk for a catalog. Great products with good support. Few bucks more than Chinese hikvision but you will get warranty and support. The 4mp line from them has great quality nightvision over the 3mp lines. Get NVR hardware and software capable of using good cameras. Cheap hardware packages will nuter a good cam. Ipcamtalk is a great resource on this. Lots of reviews and screenshots. Milkisbad can point you in right direction as well on cameras.

If you want shielded cabling, I have 3,000' of shielded cat6 Belden/Mohawk that was designated for poe cameras and not needed now. I can make a deal.

Either way, shoot me a pm if need help on cameras or NVR hardware. For milestone, I usually just use dell poweredge servers (rack or tower) or precision workstations. I use VMware esxi as the bare iron hypervisor and go from there, 99% of time. But you can get away with something midrange if want.

Axis is the standard for IP cameras. I installed 12 in my family's retail gift shop business. Also put in several more at various locations so I'm pretty familiar with them. Many of them allow you to record directly to an internal SD card. So you can configure them for motion recording and they only write to the card when motion is detected. Basically all of their models are PoE so it makes installing pretty damn easy.

I setup either a dedicated NAS (Synology) or a Linux VM configured with Samba. For example, the dozen I installed in the gift shop all write to an Ubuntu VM at 30fps @720p 24/7. It's about ~20mbps constant write to a 4TB RAID 1 array. Gives us two weeks retention.