Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks: FTP Server for Camera Files

Since the PiHole runs all the time, it now hosts an FTP server to stash snapshots from the cameras onto a 64 GB USB stick. I installed ProFTPD, which Just Worked with a few configuration tweaks:

UseIPv6             off
ServerName          "PiHole"
DefaultRoot         /mnt/cameras
RequireValidShell   off

The cameras use the BusyBox ftpput command to stash their images (with the hostname prepended), which requires a few changes to motion.conf in the cameras:

ftp_snapshot=true
ftp_host="192.168.1.2"
ftp_port=21
ftp_username=$(/bin/hostname)
ftp_password="make up your own"
ftp_stills_dir=$(/bin/hostname)

The last line uses a separate directory for each camera, although they quickly ran into the FAT32 limit of 64 K files per directory; reformatting the USB stick with an ext3 filesystem solved that problem.

Fortunately, nothing much ever happens around here …