Walk me through Adding Camera - Somewhat unique situation

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Kevin Doe

Pulling my weight
Jan 24, 2021
124
106
Ohio, USA
The camera is located in my shed, which has a fiber line running to it. On both ends of the fiber line is a media converter to get it back to a LAN cable. On the shed side the LAN goes to a 4 port POE switch. On the house side the LAN goes to one of the cam ports on the NVR. I previously set this up for one camera mounted on the shed, and it works great. I just added a second camera, located in the shed. I have it plugged into the 4 port POE switch.

The Dahua NVR isn't automatically detecting the camera, possibly because it's not plugged into it's own port on the NVR (the stream is on the same LAN cable as the original camera that I setup on the shed). What do I need to do here?
 
I'd suggest giving the new cam a unique static IP in the same subnet as the current working cam.
Do it in the house and test on the LAN before relocating to the shed.
BTW, what IS the current working cam's IP?
 
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The LAN cable going from the media converter to the NVR is on port 6. The working cam has an IP assigned as 10.1.1.70, and shows as on port "port6".
 
Last edited:
TonyR said:
I'd suggest giving the new cam a unique static IP in the same subnet as the current working cam.
Do it in the house and test on the LAN before relocating to the shed.
Click to expand...

I'll need some help with the steps on how to do that. I can easily bring it in the house and wire it up to an open port on the NVR. Usually I just let the NVR detect the cameras on it's own and don't have to do anything really other than wait for the camera to show up on the bottom pane of the "camera" page under "settings"
 
Can you show a picture of the back of the NVR so we can see what ports it has? I assume it has a number of camera ports, and one additional LAN port?
 
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The NVR is likely designed to only recognize one camera per port in a plug-and-play manner.

It is likely that you could work around that if you put the shed cameras on your regular LAN network (this way they are accessible to the NVR via its regular LAN port), assign the cameras static IP addresses, and add them to the NVR manually.

There are several steps:

1. Turn off UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) in your router. This is to prevent the cameras or the NVR from port forwarding themselves to the internet without your knowledge.
2. Plug the shed into your LAN. If your NVR's LAN port is already being used and you do not have a network switch in the room, then you will need to buy a network switch.
3. Assign each shed camera an address in your regular LAN address range (192.168.0.x?) and make sure you assign addresses that are NOT available in your router's DHCP pool so that you don't create any address conflicts.
4. Add the cameras to the NVR manually.

It is also possible you could achieve all of this using the same Port6 as you already have, without changing any of the wiring or buying a network switch. I have never used a modern NVR so I don't know how flexible they are in the configuration.
 
Best pics I could get, my rack is getting tight.
 

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I am already using the LAN port on the NVR, to connect it to my network (to monitor cams both domestically on my network and through a VPN connection remotely). I have two 24-port unmanaged switches in the same rack as my NVR, for all of the house network. I don't have the cams on the network, to minimize traffic. I do have the NVR connected to one of those switches, but no cams connected in that manner.
 
Wondering if it would work if I added a small switch between the media converter and the NVR. That way I could run one cable to port6 (for the existing cam), and another cable to the next open port on the NVR for the new cam.
 
The traffic from a few cameras shouldn't be of any consequence. Switches are designed such that a load on some ports does not affect the performance of unrelated ports.

The main concern is cybersecurity. If you don't prevent the cameras from having internet access, it is possible they could get hacked. Same goes for your NVR though.

Kevin Doe said:
Wondering if it would work if I added a small switch between the media converter and the NVR. That way I could run one cable to port6 (for the existing cam), and another cable to the next open port on the NVR for the new cam.
Click to expand...

You could give that a try too. I really have no idea if it would work as intended.
 
Instead of connecting the shed line to one of the normal camera ports on the NVR, Connect the line from the shed to the same lan switch that the NVR is already connected to.
Now you should be able to manually add each camera to the NVR.
You will need to know there IP address, and user name and password.
Always a good idea to download the manual for your particular NVR for guidance.
 
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Kevin Doe said:
Wondering if it would work if I added a small switch between the media converter and the NVR. That way I could run one cable to port6 (for the existing cam), and another cable to the next open port on the NVR for the new cam.
Click to expand...

I tried this. It did not work at all. None of the ports on the NVR worked, and no cameras were able to be visible. I put it back to normal (removed the temporary switch), and power cycled the POE switch in the shed. This time the NVR detected the new camera, but the old one isn't working. I wonder what makes the NVR choose one cam over the other. Looks like I may have to try putting these two cameras on my "house" switch, and manually add them. I suppose I'd need to know their IP to do this, and probably need to set a static IP for them. I'll give this a shot. Thanks guys. I suppose this is how I'd do it for any WiFi cams, since the stream would be on my house wifi, which ultimately is on my "house" network. I always wondered how I'd do that if needed.
 
The PoE port from the NVR is assigned 1 IP address. Like 10.1.1.x

I'm not sure but you Might get it to work by assigning a unique static 10.1.1.x address to the 2nd camera
 
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bigredfish said:
The PoE port from the NVR is assigned 1 IP address. Like 10.1.1.x

I'm not sure but you Might get it to work by assigning a unique static 10.1.1.x address to the 2nd camera
Click to expand...

Just tired that. I set the 2nd camera to 10.1.1.128 static. When I power cycled all the equipment, looked like it was maybe going to work. The Port6 was showing 10.1.1.70, and I was expecting to be able to see the 1st cam, and then have to find the cam on 10.1.1.128, but the 2nd cam came up. I checked the network settings on the cam thinking maybe I forgot to save the static IP changes. Static IP was still selected, but the static IP was changed to 10.1.1.70. I guess the NVR can override and change the camera settings?
 
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Somewhat random aside. Following bp2008s instructions for adding cams to the switch. I'm going through my verify my router's UPnP is disabled. It was enabled, and there were three services listed. First was my Plex media server. I was able to correct that by disabling the remote access of the Plex media server. I rarely want to access it from outside my home network, and when I do, I can use my VPN connection to access as if I was on my home network. So that one is solved. There are two other services listed. They are in the DHCP assignment range, and have no further device description other than a MAC address. Doing a MAC lookup I see it's registered to Sony. I only have one Sony product (a TV), and I see that it's MAC is different. I'm guessing there is some other device on my network that's using this connection but I have no idea what it is. It's on 192.168.0.125, and using two different ports. How do I know what device this is? Or should I just disable the UPnP and try to figure out what stopped working afterwards?
 
if your camera is not plugged into the NVR use "device search" in the camera tab. let it populate it should see the camera's IP even if its not in the 10.x.x.x range. my "remote" cams are in the 192.168.0.x range.
 
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