My wife has a cousin who runs a farm. Among other things, he sells hay, sometimes in small bales and sometimes in the monster large bales. Most of his customers will show up when he's not around, load their truck, and leave a check. Unfortunately, one or more of them have perhaps been helping themselves to more than they've paid for. I offered to help design a simple surveillance system so he could say "gosh, Bob, I see you took five bales of hay, so you know you owe me $X." The goal here is to help keep honest people honest, not to defeat determined attackers. (That means, for example, that there's no need for night vision.)

From the farm house to the hay barn is far enough that it's completely out of wireless range, and the hay barn also has no power. It's probably 200-300 wire feet from the farm house to where a camera might be mounted, which is right on the edge of what you can (officially) do with a single run of Ethernet cable. Power-over-Ethernet cameras seem like the right solution here.

From playing with my own camera where a surveillance camera might be mounted, I concluded that he's going to need high-def (720p) in order to have enough detail to positively ID the errant customers (and even then, he might not be able to read license plates, but he said he can recognize each person's truck).

So... questions for the gallery:

- Active vs. passive PoE: Which one is which? If I buy a PoE-capable Ethernet switch, what's it putting out? Passive PoE has much shorter range (FAQ), which would be an issue here.

- These various camera seem to output H.264 video (example: Axis M1114E), including various fancy features like motion detection. What isn't standard, or isn't exactly apparent, is how exactly standard this stuff is, like whether you can hook any software DVR up to any H.264 camera and expect everything to just work. Anybody have experience with this? Ideally, I want to recommend some specific thing to buy and install, then walk away and not get stuck supporting him with products that I don't particularly understand.

- At least right now, most IP surveillance cameras and related recording and support stuff seem to be targeted at professional needs, like managing your museum. To make an analogy, he doesn't need Adobe Lightroom; he needs iPhoto. What's the right answer?

- Would you spec out a generic PC to do the recording or a dedicated DVR-like thing like the Vivotek NR8201. Of course, their literature is decidedly unclear about whether they work with *any* IP camera or only their own.

- EDIT: oooh, open-source software for managing cameras! ZoneMinder.

Any thoughts or advice on how to pull something like this together would be much appreciated.

(For future reference, for myself if nobody else, the semi-decent chat forum for this stuff seems to be cctvforum.com.)