Dahua HDW5231R-ZE takes power but no longer negotiates network?

Nic Jansma

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I had installed 6x Dahua IPC-HDW5231R-ZE 2MP Starlight Cameras on my house 3 months ago. A few week ago, one of the cameras has stopped working.

By appearances the camera looks fine. When plugged into the Netgear PoE router that all the other cameras have been plugged into, the "right" port LED on the switch (power indicator) is solid green, meaning the camera is (trying to) power itself.

However, the network port never activates -- the "left" port LED (network status / activity) never turns on. All of the other ports with other Dahua cameras turn solid orange to indicate 10/100 speed and blink to indicate activity. This camera's right power LED port is active but the left network LED port never does anything.

I opened the camera up and do not see any obvious damage. I took out the SD card to remove that as a possibility from the equation, and still no luck.

I looked at all of the wires inside and they all seem secure.

There was one "button" I found on the inside of the camera, on the opposite side of the board from the SD card. I wasn't sure if this was a hard-reset switch possibly? I tried interacting with it, pushing it while it was powered, but it didn't seem to help.

Is there anything else I can do to debug what's wrong?
 

Nic Jansma

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Thanks @SouthernYankee for the tips!

I've tried all of those things:

1. Using a new manufactured Cat6 cable plugging the camera directly into my PoE switch
2. Using a standalone 12V adapter plugging the camera via Cat6 into the PoE switch
3. Using a standalone 12V adapter plugging the camera via Cat6 into a separate non-PoE switch
4. Tried the camera's reset procedure -- I see the camera's internal LED blip off for ~20 seconds then come back on.

The good news is the camera's internal yellow-ish LED on the motherboard is powered on (and blips off after holding the reset button), so it's getting some sort of power.

But unfortunately, none of those have resulted in it showing activity on left LED link-negotiation the switch, nor being able to connect/ping to the camera.

My subnet is 192.168.0.1, so for configuring the cameras I've always switched one computer over to 192.168.1.x to configure them back to 192.168.0.1. I've verified this camera is not active on the 192.168.1.108 subnet right now.

Bottom line is I don't think any network activity is happening because the switch port's link-negotiation LED never powers up to orange (10/100) -- I only ever see the switch port's power LED (if using PoE).
 

fenderman

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Did you properly seal the ethernet connection to prevent water entry? Are there burn marks on the ethernet connection?
 

Nic Jansma

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@fenderman - Yes, I used the built-in seal so the ethernet header was enclosed in the water-tight seal. As far as I can tell, there are no burn marks on the ethernet connector nor on the board itself.
 

cd36

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I had this happen to a camera of mine too. Was never able to get it to communicate, but would power up with Poe. I believe I could even hear it change up night mode, just no comm
 
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