Category: 5-minute troubleshooting

5-minute troubleshooting – “Remote IP-camera”

Posted on by Vladimir Gerasimov

Several weeks ago we were given a camera from one of our clients who said – “could you please check if it works correctly, something is not right”.

When we asked them about camera’s IP address, we got “I don’t know”. Well, it’s not the first time we hear that.

Fortunately, manufacturer has implemented MDNS-based camera discovery feature in own VMS (video management system). It worked and after performing discovery process we found IP address of the camera is 10.22.107.41 (By the way this was factory IP address for the cam, so it wasn’t changed by client).

So far so good, we tried to access the camera, but suddenly got “wrong password” response. For sure that meant the customer had changed default password. So we asked him for the actual one but got – you guessed it – “I don’t know, some other engineers have set it”.

Continue reading “5-minute troubleshooting – “Remote IP-camera”” →

5-minute troubleshooting. “No image!”

Posted on by Vladimir Gerasimov

One of our customers was trying to add 3rd party IP-camera into our video management software (VMS). There is indeed such possibility, but not all camera manufacturers/models are supported. In other words, it’s always better to try and see if it works.

The process of adding 3rd party camera looks like the next:

  • Add camera in corresponding menu:

  • Define an URL to access MJPEG-stream.

Read more…

5-minute troubleshooting. Can you hear me?

Posted on by Vladimir Gerasimov

Here I want to start new article series called “5-minute troubleshooting”. In these articles I’m going to describe short simple cases which we solved very quickly using protocol analysis and which could take much more time if we use another approach. So, let’s go.

One day we received an IP camera from our customer with the next complaint: “No image, no ping, the camera just disappeared from a network”.
First, we checked whether the camera was receiving PoE (yes it was), and booted up normally (according to camera LEDs no problems were here also).
Next step? Let’s try to ping it using IP-address our customer provided to us. No reply (and no surprise actually).
At this point it would be nice to check port statistics and status to eliminate L1 failure:

1_switch

Read more…