Connection to camera fails (after a power outage)

[truglo]

My IP cam setup with 3x cameras and Blue Iris has been working swell for the better part of a year. It has been through power outages before with no problems, however this last one seems to have caused a problem with one of the cameras. The camera webpage and the video stream is not working or very intermittent.

The camera in question is a Dahua Hdbw4231fp-as (mini IR dome). The camera is still connecting to the network and getting the correct static IP from my router. When attempting to connect (using the plugin with IE11) it at best loads up a corrupt page (no graphics, some random characters...), but more often when I try the browser just says the page is not available. In Blue Iris, when I unplug/plug in the camera it sometimes shows a valid still image (with correct current time) inside a 'watchdog failure' background, which makes me think it may not be totally bricked. I can successfully ping the camera from my PC.

The POE switch is working fine and showing the correct power output to all the cameras. All of my camera system was hooked up to a decent quality UPS at the time (active pfc, 30min run time, auto power off). I'm guessing since the camera is POE, the UPS warranty policy won't cover replacing it.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues with their Dahua cams? Any ideas how I might proceed to fix the camera?

I hope I can fix this without having to replace the camera altogether. If it comes down to having to flash firmware with SPI or UART tools, I have them on hand and I am familiar with their use. Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[TonyR]

Insure all camera IP's are static; choose un-assigned, unique IP's that are outside the router's DHCP pool -OR- make a reservation for each of those IP's in the router.
This is because Blue Iris expects to always see the same IP so it cannot be allowed to change in the camera.

 

[truglo]

Update: WOOHOO... It was just a corrupted SD card causing all this mess!

I would have thought the camera would be able to handle that more gracefully, but as soon as I removed the SD card and replugged the camera, everything worked again. I loaded the SD card on my PC and sure enough a bunch of jibberish files & folders indicating a corrupt file system. I reformatted the card, plopped it back in the cam, and all is well. So just in case anyone else experiences problems after a power outage, check your SD card before jumping down the rabbit hole!

TonyR, I think you missed the part where I said, "...getting the correct static IP from my router".

Now the lingering question remains... is there a way to prevent the SD from being corrupted in a power outage (guessing the answer is no), and if not is there a way to ensure the network and stream are not interrupted if it does get corrupted? I may need to look in to firmware upgrades to see if I can make this camera (possibly others?) immune to this.

Thanks,
Kev

 

[TonyR]

TonyR, I think you missed the part where I said, "...getting the correct static IP from my router".

Glad your problem is fixed but no, I didn't miss that.

You see 1) if the camera has a static IP, then the router does not "give" the camera a "correct static IP" and 2) I figured anyone that thinks that is the case needs to be given the info that I did.

A back at ya.