Stop and do a ton of research, define your use case and what you actually want before you move forward. Otherwise you may spend a lot of time and money and end up with a camera system that doesn’t come close to what you want it to do.

https://ipcamtalk.com/ is a decent set of forums to start learning some, learn about various camera models, etc.

Really define your use case, what are the camera’s for, what do you need them to do during the day and night. Many people think that wide field of view at 2.8mm is great because they can see a lot but then discover there aren’t enough pixels to tell who someone is from even 15 ft away, and then they discover the ccd is absolute dog shit at night. It’s relatively easy to get a decent picture with a tiny undersized ccd during the day with a lot of light, but at night things are different. Make sure you understand DORI (detection, observation, recognition, and identity), measure the distances you’re going to be working with so you can cover the important DORI aspects, ensure the field of view, and resolution support what you want. Understand what difficult scenes look like, sun dumping directly into the camera at sunset will fuck up all shitty software based wdr.

Use POE it’ll save you headaches. You can buy industrial poe switches that you can place in the attic depending on code / attic temperatures. In fact just buy better camera’s it’ll save you headaches.

What are you going to use for an NVR? or are you goin to try to use on camera recording?

If you want everything recessed look at buying a small structured media center that’ll fit cabling, switches, power, etc.

Never, there are to many solid and ‘free’ / low cost alternatives such as opnsense, sophos xg, etc. Between the alternatives and the bullshit from their idiot management / owner I’ll never touch their products / software and push everyone I can away from them.

I think they may have shot themselves in the foot on this one. One of my friends is the lead network engineer at a midsized MSP, and after this fiasco they’ve already committed to never buying another netgate box or pfsense license again, they’re evaluating opnsense and other appliances in the same cost range. They’ve also heard a few other MSP’s they sometimes compete with are exploring alternatives as well. Time will tell how this plays out.

UL rated, I don’t worry. There are a thousand other things which could and do cause fire. Hope you never have kids they’re a vastly more likely source of home fires as well. Your odds of being stuck by lightening are greater. And if you strip away the kitchen as the majority of home fires your odds of being stuck by lightening in a single year isn’t that far off. Yes this is a completely irrational fear.