A daily LLM-powered health check flagged that 8 out of 10 cameras had crash counts in the hundreds. The root cause turned out to be two baby monitor cameras, a go2rtc reconnect window, and a vaapi cascade failure — none of which were directly obvious. Here’s how we found it and fixed it.
How the Issue Was Found # I’ve been building a daily home health agent — a scheduled script that queries all home services (Frigate, Home Assistant, Paperless, the arr stack) and passes the data to a local LLM for analysis. The idea: instead of manually checking dashboards, get a morning summary that flags anything unusual.
Setting up Frigate NVR on a dedicated Debian server (Intel N97) to replace a traditional NVR. Covers Docker compose, go2rtc stream config, hardware acceleration, HA integration, push notifications, and zone-based alerting. Traffic between VLANs goes through the main router (UCG Ultra).
Hardware & Context # Server: Intel N97 mini PC (debian.lan, 10.0.10.11), Debian 13 Cameras: 8 Reolink PoE cameras on camera VLAN (10.0.40.0/24), 2 Nanit monitors on IoT VLAN (10.0.20.0/24) Existing NVR: kept running for continuous recording; Frigate handles detection and event clips only Home Assistant: on IoT VLAN (10.0.20.10), MQTT broker already running Storage Design # Frigate recordings go to a dedicated NAS share — no local NVMe waste for surveillance video.