Need help picking out Equipment for remote Location- Needs to boot back up easily

[CaliGirl]

Tangent, no remote devices are connected, Nest, wifi wemo switches, asus remote client app, team viewer, etc.

The no Ip client is running on the Asus router, as well as one extra foscam camera for redundancy. Foscam camera emails me any time the ip changes. The Asus router reports to noip.com anytime the ip changes to updates the dynamic dns.

 

[tangent]

Tangent, no remote devices are connected, Nest, wifi wemo switches, asus remote client app, team viewer, etc.

The no Ip client is running on the Asus router, as well as one extra foscam camera for redundancy. Foscam camera emails me any time the ip changes. The Asus router reports to noip.com anytime the ip changes to updates the dynamic dns.

Then called the cable company to reset it remotely, they did and said they have a connection to it and everything is working again on their end. BUT, I am no longer able to communicate to my Asus router, Dell computer through Team Viewer or other items. Most likely because the dynamic IP address has changed.

Seems pretty clear that either the modem isn't working right, the router, or the cable between them. I wouldn't put much stock in the cable company's claims that it's up.

My sister just had to spend hours on the phone with Comcast to get them to send a technician out when BOTH her TV and Internet weren't working and they kept insisting it was her modem's fault. Turns out her neighbors dog dug up the coax and chewed it to shreds. This is a line they replaced 7 months ago and left un-buried for 2 months, they pretty much told her sorry we're to lazy to bury the line right now, good luck mowing your lawn. Nobody does customer service quite like Comcast.

I think I should build a twitter bot that tweets "Have a Comcastic day!" several times a day at anyone who puts "formerly verified" in their twitter bio.

 

[Q™]

@CaliGirl please let us know what the issue and resolution turn out to be.

 

[CaliGirl]

Will do guys. Locked out of options until I can drive 3.5hrs up there. Last winter it was a snapped drop line from the telephone. Talking to any cable company and especially comcast is an instant mood changer. We all avoid it, we need an industry disruptor like Tesla to reinvent internet access or a company that focuses on the human to human customer service.

Next option would be to get cellular hot spot tied into a dual wifi router and be able to access the system through a cell phone connection to check on it. As suggested a few months back. But this seems overly complex to switch between what internet service is up and running cable vs. cell and I really don't want another monthly fee, Pay as you go only.

 

[Q™]

Many low-cost routers (such as the Asus RTAC68U) have a auto-failover capability which automatically switchs from cable to cell service when the main/default connectivity method fails. I use an AT&T 4G/LTE Hotspot/Router for failover connectivity and I deployed a RTAC68U configured as a wireless bridge from the AT&T unit to our LAN. This works well. The AT&T 4G/LTE Hotspot is cheap (I believe approximately $10.00 per month). The upfront cost is the purchase of the AT&T 4G/LTE Hotspot (around approximately $175.00 as I remember?) plus a one-time charge of $500.00 to assign a fixed IP address to the unit.

 

[smoothie]

You might be able to "ping" the no-ip host name and it might resolve to the current IP address. I would suggest you open a command prompt and type "ping caligirl.no-ip.com" or whatever the correct hostname is for your setup. It may respond with something like "pinging caligirl.no-ip.com (47.208.187.189) with 32 bytes of data" and probably "request timed out" 4 times. That response will show you what IP address the DDNS system resolves caligirl.no-ip.com to which might be your current public IP address. If the connection is down this will not help you, if the public IP has cycled to another value it might help you. It will depend on if the No-IP systems assigns your current public IP as the resolved destination of your host name, usually most DDNS systems will resolve to the public IP but I am not familiar with no-ip specifically so I cannot say that it does it this way.

I suspect that the connection is down. Teamviewer should have updated its connection to the Teamviewer servers after a few minutes with the new IP if the address had simply cycled. The cycling of the public IP on your system would only cause teamviewer to be offline for a few minutes. The teamviewer software installed on your Dell calls out to the teamviewer servers every few minutes, the source IP address that is coming form is recorded in the teamviewer system as being associated to the specific teamviewer installation with the "your ID of 123-456-789" or whatever it is. Because the teamviewer software on your Dell initiates the connection out to the teamviewer servers it doesn't matter that the public IP address has cycled, if the teamviewer servers were trying to establish a connection to your Dell and the public IP has cycled to something else the connection would fail. But it would only fail until the teamviewer client on your Dell told the teamviewer servers that the address has changed then it would start working again. Given that significant time has passed since Teamviewer last worked for you the most likely explanation is that the circuit is offline and not passing traffic at all.

Think of this like a telephone. If I want to call Dell to order a computer I can call Dell's phone number and they will answer and sell me a computer. But if I move and change my phone number how is Dell going to know that number has changed unless I tell them. That is how teamviewer basically works. The teamviewer servers are Dell and I am your computer at the lake house. When the public IP address cycles it is like I have gotten a new phone number, Dell can't call me because they are dialing the wrong number but once I call them then they know my new number and can call me when they like.

 

[CaliGirl]

Hey guys. Wanted to report back since it has been awhile. I never was able to get the internet running for about 3 weeks until I had my brother up there. I had him recycle the power on the devices in a particular order and it started working again. The internet just doesn’t always know how to get going again when the power goes out. Drives me crazy.

Still have not, but thinking of tying into a cell backup system with wifi switches simply to reboot the internet cable modem and wifi router in a particular order. @tangent is helping me with a remote cell modem build. Very cool idea!

Sometime in December 2017 we got the internet back up and it has been working great all winter. There has been a few power outages and the internet went out for a few days, but the old school power timers recycled the boxes every three days and it was able to gets itself going again. Wooohoo!

Aside from the internet outages. I feel like I really have the machine I set out to build 1.5 years ago. The Blue Iris on the Dell computers works amazing. The Dahua cameras are fabulous. Having Adobe Premiere on the Dell and logging into remotely with Team Viewer to edit has been spectacular. I’ll post another edit of the time lapses. Very cool to work with 20gb of data remotely and not transfer it over the internet.

The cameras and Blue Iris have worked flawlessly through hot and cold and snow and rain and very happy with the choices people helped me with. Could not have done it without all the help of this forum.

It is snowing tonight. Below is a video of me looking through the tapes. I get really good 15fps on live feed, not sure why the recorded motion clips have slow 5fps playback speed??? But so so so happy with BI and @bp2008 ’s amazing web GUI. Feeling thankful tonight.

 

[CaliGirl]

 

[bp2008]

I'm not sure why some parts of your clips played so poorly, when at other times the recordings from the same camera were fine. I would suggest finding a bad part and a good part and seeing if they still play the same if you log in with teamviewer and view the same parts in the local console. It could be that the system wasn't performing well at the time those bad parts were recorded, too.

 

[looney2ns]

Hey guys. Wanted to report back since it has been awhile. I never was able to get the internet running for about 3 weeks until I had my brother up there. I had him recycle the power on the devices in a particular order and it started working again. The internet just doesn’t always know how to get going again when the power goes out. Drives me crazy.

Still have not, but thinking of tying into a cell backup system with wifi switches simply to reboot the internet cable modem and wifi router in a particular order. @tangent is helping me with a remote cell modem build. Very cool idea!

Sometime in December 2017 we got the internet back up and it has been working great all winter. There has been a few power outages and the internet went out for a few days, but the old school power timers recycled the boxes every three days and it was able to gets itself going again. Wooohoo!

Aside from the internet outages. I feel like I really have the machine I set out to build 1.5 years ago. The Blue Iris on the Dell computers works amazing. The Dahua cameras are fabulous. Having Adobe Premiere on the Dell and logging into remotely with Team Viewer to edit has been spectacular. I’ll post another edit of the time lapses. Very cool to work with 20gb of data remotely and not transfer it over the internet.

The cameras and Blue Iris have worked flawlessly through hot and cold and snow and rain and very happy with the choices people helped me with. Could not have done it without all the help of this forum.

It is snowing tonight. Below is a video of me looking through the tapes. I get really good 15fps on live feed, not sure why the recorded motion clips have slow 5fps playback speed??? But so so so happy with BI and @bp2008 ’s amazing web GUI. Feeling thankful tonight.

Don't short change yourself, you are the one that pulled it off. Good job!
FYI: UI3 is up to build 27.

 

[smoothie]

Yeah like @looney2ns said you deserve a great deal of the credit. We may have answered questions and given recommendations but ultimately you had to walk the path to your success. Congrats on the system and being happy with it, we are all glad we could help you on your journey. And thanks for the update.

 

[CaliGirl]

I'm not sure why some parts of your clips played so poorly, when at other times the recordings from the same camera were fine. I would suggest finding a bad part and a good part and seeing if they still play the same if you log in with teamviewer and view the same parts in the local console. It could be that the system wasn't performing well at the time those bad parts were recorded, too.

I investigated this and can’t find a reason. I feel like the computer works harder once the ivs or motion sensing is working and it records the alert clip. And thus over taxes cpu? Or does it record at a higher quality for recorded clips vs regular footage? All alert clips struggle but not the normal footage.

I’m afraid to upgrade Ui version remotely. Wanted to wait until I was on site increase I had issues.

 

[bp2008]

Alerts are just bookmarks into a clip, and should not affect the recording quality at all. I know you were set up with direct to disk recording so it shouldn't cause any significant amount of CPU usage when recording is happening.

You can't break anything upgrading the UI version, no worries there.

 

[CaliGirl]

I feel like the bookmarked clips have more complexity in the scene. I.e. a moving car or lots of snow falling from the trees vs the other shots being static with the occasional tree swaying. Is there a setting in my cameras or BI that would make the computer handle moving objects scenes easier?

I have IVS enabled on this camera too. To send me email snapshot at certain tripwire points. I can see that maybe causing trouble if they were tripped at the same time. But it is not being tripped in these scenes above.

I upgraded to build 27 I believe 4.6.6.1. I dropped the new file into the www folder. Thank for instilling confidence.

 

[CaliGirl]

Never did figure out why my BI alerts suffer from poor fps playback. I am all ears if anyone has more ideas?? Very frustrating.

I was at the remote site this weekend to enjoy the big snow storm. Was so impressive how the Dahua Cameras handled 4 ft. of snow.

Here is a close up of the PTZ mounted on the tree. Don't laugh at my install, but what do you think?
Deck and driveway cams:
Drone filming the PTZ camera:

 

[fenderman]

Never did figure out why my BI alerts suffer from poor fps playback. I am all ears if anyone has more ideas?? Very frustrating.

I was at the remote site this weekend to enjoy the big snow storm. Was so impressive how the Dahua Cameras handled 4 ft. of snow.

Here is a close up of the PTZ mounted on the tree:
Deck and driveway cams:
Drone filming the PTZ camera:

if you are using an asus router (or possible other brands) try disabling ddos protection.

 

[looney2ns]

Never did figure out why my BI alerts suffer from poor fps playback. I am all ears if anyone has more ideas?? Very frustrating.

I was at the remote site this weekend to enjoy the big snow storm. Was so impressive how the Dahua Cameras handled 4 ft. of snow.

Here is a close up of the PTZ mounted on the tree. Don't laugh at my install, but what do you think?
Deck and driveway cams:
Drone filming the PTZ camera:

@CaliGirl
Nothing funny looking about the install. Looks good, and it works!
Why is video of your drone stop-motion-animated?
Good stuff, thanks for sharing.

 

[CaliGirl]

Just an update, I moved over to a Windows computer at home and I am still struggling to reach and adjust the web GUI on the Dahua cameras. It always asked for a plug-in to install which I do. I have tried chrome and Microsoft edge and Internet Explorer. But nothing seems to work correctly. It really limits your ability to use the features of the Dahua cameras because I can barely adjust the IVS systems or other settings.

Does anyone have success reaching the web GUI with their Dahua cameras? What about hikivision is that any better?

 

[Fastb]

I use Pale Moon browser, after running into the problems you describe. Very similar to FireFox browser. Folks here recommended it, works like a charm. For now. Browser plug-ins have potential security weaknesses. Something different will be required in soon, IMHO.

Fastb

 

[CaliGirl]

Palemoon totally worked Fastb, thank you! I know it has been discussed before, but I didnt get it to work well on the mac last time. Worked well on Windows 10.