BI will not play a "clip" from remote access. Live video is fine.

[hawk521]

I have the latest BI download (as of Sep 21, 2014) running on a Windows Home Server with 3 cameras installed (Airsight, Cisco, and Sricam).

All cameras are working. The Sricam is configured in BI as a FOSCAM MPEG because the Sricam AP005 choice was troublesome.

Everything was working until my Apple Extreme WiFi router developed a problem causing WiFi disconnects and I performed a factory reset to resolve that issue. The router is fine now - and I set it back up with the same options (NAT table was a test of memory).

Now, when using the url access to BI remotely, I can attach and view the live camera images. But when I select a stored "clip", BI says "Connecting..." in the middle of the image area and never moves beyond that. I can recover from that condition by selecting a live view any of the cameras.

When home on my LAN, I can view the clips without this problem. Obviously I've got something configured wrong. It may well be in the router setup - but nothing appears to be having any problem except BI and playing a clip.

I am using port 1050 to forward to my WHS Blue Iris url as 10.0.1.240:1050. This works fine both at home (on the LAN) and from remote access for live camera viewing. But the inability to play the stored clips from a remote access is perplexing. I have confirmed the same remote access problem on three other computers at work.

Should I switch the port number to something more standard?

Any ideas on where to start troubleshooting this situation?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[nayr]

IMHO everyone is better off if they setup a VPN Tunnel for accessing BI and your Cameras.. all smartphones now have VPN clients on them and its vastly more secure and not really any more trouble than forwarding a bunch of ports.

if you have any indoor cameras you should be using VPN, security on all IPCams is complete junk and there full of backdoors, hardcoded logins, etc.. Google can index your camera login page and a simple search for strings only on your camera will show up and wam.. If you expose your camera to the internet you can be sure someone doing broad scans on the internet will find it and attempt to brute force there way in, sooner than later.

If you setup a VPN to use Client Certificates you can access your network without any passwords to enter, unless someone gets that certificate file then nobody can brute force there way in and every time you access your network the entire session is encrypted, which is needed on untrusted networks like Public WiFi, Employer Networks, Etc..

 

[hawk521]

IMHO everyone is better off if they setup a VPN Tunnel for accessing BI and your Cameras....

I may give this a try. We use a VPN for remote access to our work LAN via a SonicWall firewall. I've not given any thought to doing something like that at home...but it is an interesting suggestion. Our work VPN uses a rather long PSK rather than a certificate. I'll have to bring myself up to speed on using a certificate for authentication.

Will do some research and see if I can figure it out.

If you know any good sources (urls) on how to set it up properly, feel free to share!

I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme router. Any thoughts on whether that will suffice?

 

[nayr]

I dont think Airport Extreme can act as a VPN Server, but another Mac on your network could do this job http://www.netputing.com/applications/vpn-activator/
Possibly even your BI Server could do the VPN Server

username/password is ok if you use rather long random phrases.. for iphones/ipads/apple laptops there is an enterprise config util you can create a profile with including all your default VPN/Wifi/Network settings and then you just import the profile and it sets everything up without you having to manually configure each device.

 

[hawk521]

My VPN is now setup and working. I used the Windows Home Server 2011 system that contains my NAS drives. Turns out that WHS has a VPN capability built right in. Setup was as easy as following the bouncing ball after finding the web instructions.

I am now at work and just setup my workstation to link via VPN to home. It properly assigned me an IP address and appears to be working just fine.

Thanks for the suggestion.

-Hawk

 

[nayr]

awesome; now as an added bonus your web surfing from work is going to be alot harder to eavesdrop on