7 Dahau cameras lost connectivity

[NoloC]

Yup. Split the cams between a couple switches or just unplug a few and see what happens.

This is great news, I thimk!

 

[shmookles]

@NoloC and @nayr I agree this is good news indeed. However, I only have one camera plugged in on a 24 port /12 port POE switch that is rated for 15.4w per port across 12 ports with a 100w max. Again this is a brand new switch and I had same behavior with my previous BVTech Switch. Could this be something bad with the FW? All my cameras and my new camera that just arrived today run the DH_IPC-HX5X3X-Rhea_Eng_P_Stream3_V2.460.0000.7.R.20170306 firmware.

 

[nayr]

for the 10th time; this cannot be anything at all to do with your firmware.. and powering it successfully from a 12v power brick just proves it.. how are you terminating your ethernet cables? your not using flat cables are you?

at this point with the issues your having; doing anything at all with the firmware just risks further damage.. leave firmware alone unless its stable and not just going to randomly reboot.. if this thing looses power when your writing new firmware (that wont fix it anyhow); then you'll end up with a brick before you finally resolve your power issues..

 

[fenderman]

ok so some new developments. I got a proper 12v brick and the camera powers up with the 12v brick and I am able to get into WebUI and via configtool to manage the camera and view video. My new switch is a NETGEAR ProSAFE JGS524PE and it seems to be negotiating POE just fine based on LEDs. What else is weird is that I just received a new camera AE and upon plugging it in its exhibiting similar behavior. Could it be that somehow my switches are not pushing enough power. I mean this is just so strange that now a new camera would have the same problem.

Are you using the 568 standard to terminate cables as nayr asked about..when Itold you to test with the pc and the camera ONLY plugged into the switch did you actually do it? did you leave ANY other connection on that switch? like the router? or another camera? did you test with a short premade cable...the fact that a new camera does this points to user error, there is nothing wrong with the cams..

 

[shmookles]

problem resolved! My cabinet which houses all the switches, routers, audio/video, etc. somehow had a short and was causing the switch to not deliver enough juice to the cameras. I discovered it by accident when I decided to remove the switch from my cabinet and unplug it from my UPS. When I did that I guess whatever wire was causing the short moved and the problem went away. I went ahead and cleaned things up so ti doesn't happen anymore, but all cameras are operational. I appreciate everyones ideas and help and hopefully this helps someone in the future. Net/Net if your camera reboots constantly over POE but works with a 12v power brick fine then the issue is the POW switch in some fashion.

 

[NoloC]

I call bullshit.

 

[shmookles]

Alright more to this whole issue. I have done more troubleshooting because the issue seems to be not related to my earlier conclusion. It was just a fluke because things rebooted. @NoloC you may be right

Essentially, I went plug my plug on my switch to see what I I had originally thought may be a short. Needless to say I was able to narrow it down to my server running vmware with my BI VM (among other things). I realize running BI in a VM is not the best option, but I have a pretty beefy server at my disposal.

In any case, when I unplug the vmware esx server all my camera appear functional and configurable within config tool and webUI. When I plug my server in they stop working and exhibit the behavior described earlier in this thread where they are not configurable and appear to be rebooting.

At first I thought it was a loop, but I re-traces every cable. Even enabled loop detection on my switch. I'm at a loss because the problem is really that simple. When server is plugged into my network, the camera don't work.

I even tried adding another switch directly plugged into another port on my router and connecting the server to that switch rather than my poe switch. Same behavior. Seems as long as this server is on my network it causes the cameras to not work.

@nayr I know I been tagging you a lot in this thread and I know you have a network background as well so was hoping you could maybe chime in with some ideas or if you have seen this before?

 

[NoloC]

So if I read this correctly, even though you told us you had in fact gone through the steps we recommended, which would have eliminated your "VM Server Crap", you did not. You responded numerous times as though you had. But it seems it may have been to much work for you? So, why should anyone here help further?

Nayr and Fenderman spend a shit-load of time helping people on here. There is only so much time available and IMHO, you have exceeded yours.

Glad your cameras work OK. You mentioned you are a "network engineer". You seem to have little aptitiude for logic and this may not be the correct career choice for you. Think about fast food service.

 

[shmookles]

@NoloC i did try what I stated. Please don't be an ass and insult individuals like that. Certainly not at forums where people come for help. Also no need to speak on other individuals behalf. If you don't have time to respond or say something nice then just don't respond. Perhaps when you come to my fast food restaurant I can school you on some proper people skills.

On the other hand, the issue does not seem to be consistent which is what is crazy about this problem im experiencing. For example I started trying to narrow down whether it was the whole server or a particular VM causing this issue last night. Much to my surprise as I shut down one VM at a time. A particular VM shutdown did cause the cameras to show up on the network and become configurable. So I thought maybe the VM was breached in some fashion and DoSing the cameras but after doing some investigation i could not find any evidence of breach. I rebooted the VM and now a few of the cameras work (not all) but all VMs are back powered on.

Also remember that all my cameras worked with all these VMs turned on for several weeks without an issue. It was something that just happened a week ago out of nowhere one night.

 

[yobigd20]

FWIW I am running BI on windows 2012 server VM in ESXI 6 with no issues. I doubt the issue is VM related. Not being able to get to their web configuration pages has nothing to do with your esxi host if your opening them from a laptop or pc on the same network as your cams, especially if they are in some reboot loop. (Unless you are using some VM hosted switch /router software for routing and/or VLANs etc as part of the whole config).

Can you use a crossover cable and 12V power brick (eliminate poe) and plug one of the cameras directly into your laptop Ethernet and start from there. That would eliminate a lot of variables here.


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[shmookles]

@yobigd20 yep I have done that with every camera and it works. I have plugged in every other device in my home one by one and when I save the VM server for last and plug it in, things went down. I believe I narrowed down the issue though. There is one particular VM on my network that I was doing some beta testing for around home automation and when I power it down the cameras worked with the VM server powered up. So now I am investigating the VM a bit more, but making progress.

 

[shmookles]

ok some follow-up, so the beta testing I was doing with that VM for home automation was in fact the culprit. It was set to send a broadcast to my whole network every 10 seconds and I got in touch with the developer and he made some changes to the script and poof al the cameras are online. What a crazy run... Anyway thanks again for everyones ideas on troubleshooting ideas..

 

[yobigd20]

ok some follow-up, so the beta testing I was doing with that VM for home automation was in fact the culprit. It was set to send a broadcast to my whole network every 10 seconds and I got in touch with the developer and he made some changes to the script and poof al the cameras are online. What a crazy run... Anyway thanks again for everyones ideas on troubleshooting ideas..

Curious - Broadcasting what every 10 seconds? Sending a packet to broadcast address is quite normal and what a bunch of protocols use to discover some services etc. if it's a small packet I'd be shocked if that was the cause. If you were flooding the network with a shitload of packets at high bitrate every 10 seconds that's a different story as you were probably DOS'ing something, perhaps your network device (switch) can't handle that traffic. Or if it's virtual switch on vm host then yea dos'ing the other VMs or something if cpu can't keep up.


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[alastairstevenson]

It was set to send a broadcast to my whole network every 10 seconds

Regular broadcasts are much more frequent than that and cause no harm.
But on the other hand, there are many, many types of broadcast.
For the benefit of others - please supply some technical details.
If the Dahua cameras are unusually susceptible to something to which they should not be - maybe it would be helpful / sensible / thoughtful to let Dahua know.
We do have one of their Technical managers on the forum here.

 

[shmookles]

I'm being told they were SSDP broadcast sent every 10 seconds.

 

[alastairstevenson]

That's just a service discovery broadcast - it shouldn't be a problem.
Odd that it has the effect you've described.

Out of curiosity I just ran a LAN capture for 30secs and there were 20 SSDP broadcasts, mostly from the NAS boxes.
There would be more if any Windows boxes were running at the time.

 

[shmookles]

I could ask him to see if he could grab. E an older version of the script I was running so we could test further. It was a simple nodeJS script.

 

[Shockwave199]

All is working now right? Don't pick at it. Step away from the gear and leave it alone.

 

[shmookles]

Yup all working. But people are correct this could be a vulnerability. I mean if someone could inject these packets they can possibly take out all these cameras and render them useless while they do whatever.

 

[alastairstevenson]

If the Dahua cameras are unusually susceptible to something to which they should not be - maybe it would be helpful / sensible / thoughtful to let Dahua know.

All is working now right? Don't pick at it. Step away from the gear and leave it alone.

Yes, but ... what's bad for one installation may also be bad for others.
Hence the query for more detail.