A few years ago, someone installed cameras in my home and also installed Blue Iris. This was working fine – and my daughter was able to view the cameras in my Dallas home from her home in Houston. When Blue Iris was working just fine, it was running on a PC that was directly connected to a Time Warner cable modem. Just this week, in order to get more consistent wi-fi coverage in my home, I installed an ORBI router and two ORBI satellites (RBS50) and moved my PC to a different part of the house. The ORBI router connects directly to the Time Warner cable modem. The PC is no longer sitting in an area where I can directly connect it to the Time Warner router – it is now connected via ethernet to a ORBI satellite. As a result of these changes, my daughter can no longer view my cameras remotely. Any assistance you can give me on how to fix this would certainly be appreciated.
Can No Longer Connect Remotely
- Thread starter jasapp
- Start date
Most likely what is going on is the ORBI router is operating as a second router. I think you just need to change it to act as an access point so it doesn't mess up your local IP addresses.
How do I configure my Orbi router to act as an access point? | Answer | NETGEAR Support
Also, depending on how you configured your network you may now be sending all the camera video over your wifi network (if they are wifi cameras, then you may even be sending the video twice). This can make the camera streams and the wifi both considerably less reliable. Just be aware of that -- if you have streaming problems, video dropouts, etc, it may be caused by all that video streaming into Blue Iris over wifi.
How do I configure my Orbi router to act as an access point? | Answer | NETGEAR Support
Also, depending on how you configured your network you may now be sending all the camera video over your wifi network (if they are wifi cameras, then you may even be sending the video twice). This can make the camera streams and the wifi both considerably less reliable. Just be aware of that -- if you have streaming problems, video dropouts, etc, it may be caused by all that video streaming into Blue Iris over wifi.
This was working great for me yesterday - my daughter could see my cameras remotely. But, this morning she could not see them. I went back to the REMOTE ACCESS WIZARD and got green check marks until I got to 'Remote Access Test' and that step failed. So I backed up to 'Port Forwarding', and clicked on 'Use UPnP to Automatically Add This Rule' and then 'Add Blue Iris'. After that I got green check marks to the end of the Wizard. At that point my daughter could see the remote cameras from her end. But, I got a call from her a few hours later saying that she could no longer see the cameras. I went back into the REMOTE ACCESS WIZARD, and went through all the steps - and once again I had to go and add Blue Iris to UPnP. Can you help me understand why this is happening? Thanks in advance for your help in resolving this matter.
Well this is where it gets complicated. Most likely, your Blue Iris server's IP address is changing periodically, causing the port forwarding rule to become invalid. Running the remote access wizard creates a new forwarding rule for the new address and it begins working again ... until the next time the address changes.
There are a number of problems with this configuration. First of all, UPnP makes your network extremely vulnerable. Lots of IP cameras come with UPnP enabled so the moment they boot up, they expose themselves to the whole internet, and then those cameras get hacked. I know it sounds ridiculous but your cameras could very well be hacked and be part of a botnet already.
So step 1 is: Log in to your internet router (which is also your cable modem) and TURN OFF UPnP. Then reboot the router to make sure any ports that were opened by UPnP get closed.
Step 2: In your router, find the DHCP server settings. You need to add an IP reservation for your Blue Iris server so it always gets the same IP address from your router. If your router doesn't support IP reservations, then you will need to manually assign the IP address, subnet mask, and gateway on your Blue Iris server. This is pretty complicated for a newbie so hopefully you can do this with an IP reservation instead.
Step 3: In your router, forward a port to the Blue Iris server, with the destination port being whatever port number your Blue Iris web server is listening on. The source/external port can be nearly any number you want.
If you get that far, you should probably use whatever access restriction or parental controls your router has to disable internet access for each of your IP cameras. If they have indeed been hacked and made a part of someone's botnet, this should prevent them from calling home.
Thats all. If you can complete steps 1-3 then your Blue Iris server should be reliably accessible through the forwarded port.
There are a number of problems with this configuration. First of all, UPnP makes your network extremely vulnerable. Lots of IP cameras come with UPnP enabled so the moment they boot up, they expose themselves to the whole internet, and then those cameras get hacked. I know it sounds ridiculous but your cameras could very well be hacked and be part of a botnet already.
So step 1 is: Log in to your internet router (which is also your cable modem) and TURN OFF UPnP. Then reboot the router to make sure any ports that were opened by UPnP get closed.
Step 2: In your router, find the DHCP server settings. You need to add an IP reservation for your Blue Iris server so it always gets the same IP address from your router. If your router doesn't support IP reservations, then you will need to manually assign the IP address, subnet mask, and gateway on your Blue Iris server. This is pretty complicated for a newbie so hopefully you can do this with an IP reservation instead.
Step 3: In your router, forward a port to the Blue Iris server, with the destination port being whatever port number your Blue Iris web server is listening on. The source/external port can be nearly any number you want.
If you get that far, you should probably use whatever access restriction or parental controls your router has to disable internet access for each of your IP cameras. If they have indeed been hacked and made a part of someone's botnet, this should prevent them from calling home.
Thats all. If you can complete steps 1-3 then your Blue Iris server should be reliably accessible through the forwarded port.
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Excellent! Blocking outgoing internet access for the cameras is probably not necessary, so don't let it worry you if your router doesn't have any features for blocking access like that. If you do manage to get them blocked, they won't be able to use public NTP servers to set their clocks anymore. If that affects you, you can install a time server on your Blue Iris machine and point the cameras at that. NetTime - Network Time Synchronization Tool In fact this is a good idea anyway, because a local time server will be more reliable.