is solarwinds safe to use to monitor my lan?

[Coldair]

I used it before when I had an ASUS gaming motherboard that was constantly trying to phone home to China to launch DOS attacks on the government, including FBI, CIA, Pentagon and it was only the Nave that emailed me that my ip was trying to get through their firewalls. Anyway they had set up solarwinds to watch my internet connections and we found it was the onboard nic card's firmware which ASUS was no help on, so one of the Navy's IT gurus said to just disable it and use a plug in NIC in it;s place.

so anywho what is a good program to use to make sure the cameras are not doing phoning home?

 

[kklee]

I use a pi-hole to block DNS queries which prevents them from phoning home.

 

[alastairstevenson]

I use a pi-hole to block DNS queries which prevents them from phoning home.

Apart from when a hard-coded IP address is used, a method which I've seen a few times.
It's more effective to use an outbound blocking firewall rule configured for the device IP address on the LAN.

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

I tend to shy away from entities that encounter a SNAFU as big as what they recently made the headlines with. There are many options out there, but some are more involved than others when it comes to getting things up and running.

Have you taken a look at your router's features? Many now come with the ability to monitor traffic.

 

[Coldair]

I tend to shy away from entities that encounter a SNAFU as big as what they recently made the headlines with. There are many options out there, but some are more involved than others when it comes to getting things up and running.

Have you taken a look at your router's features? Many now come with the ability to monitor traffic.

I have a brand new netgear RAXE500 sitting on the floor in the box because for some reason netgear wanted me to have their tech support set it up with me after the first one failed after just 31 days. in hindsight I should have just gotten a hardwire router and wireless access points. right now I am just using my older Nighthawk 9000, which is behind the comcast modem. after the router it goes to a netgear gs724t main switch to a netgear POE GS324tp, which takes care of the 7 cameras at the house than down to gs108pp on one side of the driveway for 3 8mp cameras and over to the other side for 1 8mp and 3 4mp cameras and than back to the shop from the first POE switch to another gs108 for the 2 cameras back there

 

[kklee]

Apart from when a hard-coded IP address is used, a method which I've seen a few times.
It's more effective to use an outbound blocking firewall rule configured for the device IP address on the LAN.

Yep, firewall rules for those pesky ones...

 

[Coldair]

Yep, firewall rules for those pesky ones...

I have all outbound traffic from the range of ips that my cameras are on blocked off in the router but I still had on hikvision camera enable the hikconnect three years after I installed it and disabled it. when I disabled it, immediately I got a network traffic abnormal and it bricked the camera.

 

[iwanttosee]

I use my Raspberry Pi Zero W to run Pi Hole server (DNS Service), Open VPN server, DDclient (update my private IP to ddns server), NTP (time server), and NUT UPS monitor.
I use an OpenWRT router to assign DHCP, I use MAC filtering so the NVR/Cameras get "blank" for gateway and "blank" for dns1 and dns1.
No gateway nor DNS means there is no broadcast traffic from the camera either which helps to speed up my network.

Works perfect for me.