Loosing connection on hard wired cams

[restez]

I have been Using Blue Iris for about 2 years with very little problems however in the last few months it has been very unreliable. I have nine hard wired camera's in the system and 3 wireless camera's. The hard wired camera's have been off for over a week now. Usually they would go off for a couple hours or maybe a day or two but it has been well over a week with nothing but the wireless camera's working. I am using a Asus RT N66U Dual band router and several 10/100 switches to have most of my camera's hard wired because of wireless range problems. I am at wit's end on why these camera's will not connect. If I check on the Ip-Cam tool it will only show the wireless camera's that are on. When the hardwired camera's do come on they are all visable on the ip-cam tool. I have not changed any settings anywhere and am using several different brands of cameras so it is not a camera problem I don't believe. The funny thing is they haven't worked since the last day of May but could all come back on by themselves at any time. They just haven't and I would love to make them more reliable like they used to be. If anyone has any ideas or solutions to this problem I am having it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks[h=1][/h]

 

[digger11]

Sounds to me like one of your switches may be flaking out or dying. Trace out the path between the BI server and the cameras that are having problems and see if you have a bad piece of equipment.

 

[nayr]

rouge dhcp server perhaps?

you surely have a network issue, you say several switches.. give us a topology layout, a single failure could take everything out.

 

[restez]

well When I come out of the router I go to a 8 port switch then on to other switches down the line so I am suspecting the 8 port switch may be the culprit

 

[restez]

well When I come out of the router I go to a 8 port switch then on to other switches down the line so I am suspecting the 8 port switch may be the culprit

I am going to replace two switches with gigabit switches tonight then I guess start looking at cat5 connections

 

[nayr]

since you have so many switches try swapping them around and see if it helps you isolate which one is the culprit.

but you should be using GigE if your chaining so many together.. you basically only have a 100Mbit shared backbone.

 

[pozzello]

Are your cams all using DHCP to get their IP addresses? if so, my money's on Nayr's guess:
A rogue DHCP server handing out addresses not in the same subnet as the rest of your network.
Did you plug in a new router somewhere lately and not configure it properly?...

If your cams all have statically assigned addrs, then it's probably one of the switches you are daisy-chaining thru.

 

[restez]

Yes thats what I am thinking too, out of the router it goes to the 8 switch then up to a five switch and then 2 cams in front yard hook to that 5 switch and then a cat 5 cable goes out to the shop in the back where it hooks to another 5 switch that hooks to 5 more camera's out there. Worked great for last 2 years like that but nothing now. I am suspecting a bad connection on either the 8 switch or cat 5 cable or the first 5 switch or cat 5 cable. I am replacing the 10/100 switches both the first 8 and the corrisponding 5 switch and maybe the cat 5 ends to see if that will help.

 

[restez]

Ok replaced both switches last night still with no luck, going to try a patch cord between the first switch to the second switch location to see if it is a cat5 cable issue next. I took a camera down and hooked it to the first switch, the 8 port gigibit switch that comes right off the router and the camera hooked right up. Leads me to believe it is a cat5 problem.

 

[digger11]

The last time I was trying to track down an elusive network problem I bought one of these...
https://www.amazon.com/Tonor-RJ45-Network-Cable-Tester/dp/B00OUFX38W

Well worth $10, and one of the best additions to my essential set of tools in a long time.