Fixing a Camera Crash Cascade: How an LLM Health Check Found a Hidden Frigate Bug

yang@yhu.me (Yang Hu) — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0800

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
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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.

Frigate NVR Setup: From Docker to HA Notifications

yang@yhu.me (Yang Hu) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800

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
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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
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Frigate recordings go to a dedicated NAS share — no local NVMe waste for surveillance video.

Nvr on Yang's Notes

Fixing a Camera Crash Cascade: How an LLM Health Check Found a Hidden Frigate Bug

How the Issue Was Found #

Frigate NVR Setup: From Docker to HA Notifications

Hardware & Context #

Storage Design #

How the Issue Was Found
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Hardware & Context
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Storage Design
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