Sporadic "Can not find the network host" for all cameras on QC826

U

user328729837492

n3wb
Apr 22, 2020
10
2
USA
Hello,

We have a (Dahua) Q-See QC826 NVR with 8x Q-See QCN8093B cameras. The system is not plugged into our home network, we just have it connected to the TV via HDMI as well as a USB mouse.

Sporadically we have been having all video feeds drop out, and the only message shown on the screen is "Can not find the network host" followed by the camera's IP address, for each camera. All the cameras are plugged into the green POE ports of the NVR. There has been no power interruption as the NVR continues to run. I have checked the logs (not that they are that verbose), and all it looks like is "IPC Offline" followed by another camera "IPC Offline" a few minutes later, and then another a few minutes after that, and so on.

Rebooting the system via the menu option, or by hard switching off from the switch on the back, works maybe 1 time out of 10 tries. The 1 time it works, it comes back on with all cameras no problem. But it's very frustrating sitting there, turning it off, waiting, turning it on, waiting and hoping, and going no where. We have tried waiting in between boots anywhere between 1 to 30 minutes, with no effect. It seems random when it decides to come on all again. Sometimes the thing can go fine for weeks before this comes up again.

The unit was purchased as a kit from Costco in 2018. I think it's needless to say on this forum, Q-See support is beyond useless.

Anyone have any additional troubleshooting techniques I can try? I have probably forgotten to list all the techniques I tried already. This has been going on for months, but increasingly more often lately.

Thank you.
 
I just wanted to add, that for some reason when I go to the POE menu, I can see all my cameras drawing around 3-4W, using ports 1-8 (which are the POE ports on the back of the NVR), however all of them have red circles. I have confirmed on my other NVR at a different house, that the cameras plugged into the POE ports should have green circles along with a transmission speed.

To make things even weirder, if I plug my cameras into the non-POE ports, the POE menu still shows them drawing 3-4W (on ports 9-16) and somehow, the cameras still work.
 
Are you using H.264 or H.265? What are your bitrate settings? I started with a bundled Q-See system a few years ago. When I see that message, I found it meant the cameras were exceeding the capabilities of the NVR. See if your issue occurs when you have less cameras connected. You should also see if H.265 helps if you don't already have that turned on in each camera interface. You could also see if there is a firmware update for the cameras and NVR. Your POE issue may also be something fixed in a newer firmware. Are both of your NVR the same model with the same firmware?
 
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Looks like there may be firmware updates for the cameras also. You may consider lowering the framerate to 15, and maybe the resolution in non-critical areas. 8 4k cameras at 30fps is a lot, I don't care what the NVR specs say, that's a lot for any NVR or system to process.

1588114527623.png
 
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Msquared thank you for your replies. I will try with just a couple of cameras plugged in and will also try lowering the resolution or frame rate. I am updated to the latest version of the firmware, but this may possibly be when this all started - I have not yet made a determination on that yet.

Don't you think it's weird that I am able to plug the cameras into non-POE ports on the back of the router, and they work?

Thank you
 
Do you have your cameras connected to a power supply? There's only 2 ways to get power to the camera, either the power plug or POE, so if you're getting access to the camera, it's one or the other. I'm unaware of any router that has POE ports, so yes, that would seem strange if you have a camera plugged directly into a non-POE port of your router and can see the camera.

For starters, to optimize your network bandwidth with your current setup, I would recommend you use H.265 and turn frame rate down to 15. See if your situation improves.

I see you're newer to the forum, welcome. I'm going to pay it forward and recommend you read the wiki, it has a wealth of information, even if not directly applicable to your setup.

Also, please consider to give other forum members a "like" when a post helps you out. It's a user based forum with many skilled members, so let them know you appreciate their time to contribute.

Post back and I'll be glad to help further if I can.
 
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Yeah, I am a long time lurker. That's how I set up both of our systems (two different houses) through the wealth of information on this forum.

That is the weird thing. None of my cameras are using power supplies. They only use Cat5e direct to the NVR (no router or switch in between). And the fact that I can plug them into the non-PoE ports on the back of the NVR and they still work, just confuses the heck out of me. The PoE menu on the NVR even shows them plugged into those ports and drawing 3-4W. I mean typically I keep them in the labeled PoE ports, and they have been fine (up until a few months ago when this problem all started), it was just while troubleshooting that I decided to test the non-PoE ports and discovered this weirdness.

Thank you.

PS I forgot to mention I was already on H.265 but with 20FPS, so I have tuned it down to 15FPS.
 
I'll be darned, you are right! Mine doesn't quite look like that photo though, it has "PoE Ports" written in a green box and the same green box lines continue around only the first 8 ports on the left, and then the right 8 ports are inside a separate black box so I guess that is why I was mistaken.

In any case, I tried plugging in only one camera, using the most minimal encoding settings (like 720p, 1 FPS) and it still went offline every so often for around 10-30 seconds. I also tried plugging in the NVR to the power outlet directly, without a surge protector in between.

My last ditch effort will be factory reset I suppose. I have to figure out how to factory reset the cameras first I guess, then I will reset the NVR and try to make it fresh out of the box so we will see.

Thank you again msquared.
 
If your system is a standalone system, then a factory reset would probably be the next logical step.

The factory reset option is under the system tab in the NVR.

1588564573017.png
 
A factory reset should trigger the setup wizard, just like when you first started the system.
 
Ok let me add some tidbits after troubleshooting some more last night.

Firstly, I noticed that anytime I unplug the NVR from the router, or unplug the router from power, (or Comcast just has an outage), all cameras come up with "Can not find the network host". I am not sure how this is possible, since the camera feeds to the NVR should be independent of NVR connectivity to the internet. But this would explain a lot of my outages if this is the way it works. Comcast internet is unreliable in my area, I just thought that the NVR ran it's own routing internally, independent of internet connectivity. Why it should require internet in order to record and display camera feeds directly plugged into the PoE ports is beyond me.

Secondly, all directions on the internet regarding gaining direct access to the camera (like changing my PC IP address to that of NVR domain and plugging it into the back of NVR) do not work for me. The only way I can access the cameras is by having a POE injector, and plugging that into my router directly. However, a long while back, I was having a constant problem with my cameras coming in out of sequence everytime the NVR rebooted. I preferred to always have Channel 1 be a certain camera, and so on. The only way at the time to ensure this, was to assign each camera a static IP within the camera settings itself (in the NVR I can't find any type of DHCP server that let's me assign IP based on MAC address). So I did so. And this solved my old problem of cameras being out of order all the time and the names being wrong and etc...

So guess what? If I assigned all my cameras to have static IPs (based on the LAN IP of the host NVR) then there is no way to access them unless I plug them into a router that has the same LAN IP as the NVR host. So I either need to keep a spare router with the same host IP address, or I need to change my normal router to use the same IP range. I did the latter, got into the camera via PoE injector, and then told the camera to go back to dynamic IP. Now I plugged the camera into the NVR, and it took a while to recognize it, but eventually it did. Of course, it assigned it an already existing IP address, so I lost a different camera in the process. So I had to go back, tell my router to use the same base IP address but assign devices to a slightly different range that didn't include any of the IPs already listed in the NVR, and then plug the camera back to my router, let it get a new IP address, then put it back to the NVR.

Now the NVR had all my cameras again, with camera 8 (the one I used for testing) given a random IP address outside of the normal range for the others. After a couple of reboots to double check everything, camera 8 seems to be working fine, although it takes much longer to load than 1-7 which pop up right away (if they pop up at all). After a day of logging, I can see that camera 8 no longer suffers from the random IPC Offline errors, and also in the PoE menu of the NVR, it indeed shows a green circle instead of red.

Obviously I will continue to monitor the log for a while, to make sure camera 8 remains error free. Then I will do the same process for cameras 1-7. My worry is that I will arrive at the same problem as I had in the beginning, where the cameras would get logged in all willy nilly and out of order every time there was a reboot. I prefer to have (for instance) Camera 1, pointed at my driveway, to be channel 1. And so forth. So we will see what happens.

Thank you.
 
I have made a couple more discoveries in my research of this issue. As I mentioned, if I make the cameras use DHCP instead of static IP addresses, it results in them being seen properly in the POE screen. So, for testing, I set 4 cameras to DHCP and 4 to Static.
The static ones continue to suffer from <IPC Offline> error that lasts for 10-30 seconds every few hours or so, there is no predictable cycle to this. The DHCP ones do not suffer from this issue.

However, to clarify on the mass outage problem I was seeing, it is definitely (somehow) related to internet connectivity. If the NVR is unplugged from my internet router, the cameras continue to function as normal. However, once I plug the NVR back to the internet router, all cameras die. The 4 static say "Cannot find network host" and the 4 DHCP simply vanish from the NVR entirely, they are no longer listed under camera registration. A menu-based system restart does not solve this - they cameras simply come back the same way (4 statics say "Cannot find network host" and the 4 DHCP simply aren't there). However, if I menu>Shut Down, then let the system sit for a couple minutes, then power it back on via the push button on the front (not the power switch on the back), then all cameras will come back - led first by the 4 statics which appear within a couple minutes, followed by the 4 DHCP which appear close to 10 minutes after booting up.

The two things I just can't grasp:
Why does the recovery of internet connectivity cause all camera feeds to die in the NVR?
Why does menu Shut Down, wait, then power on via switch result in recovery of cameras whereas a menu Restart does not?

Anyways, as I said before, to anyone thinking of getting a Q-See - STAY VERY FAR AWAY. Lorex isn't perfect (they are both Dahua) but in my experience Lorex is twice the system Q-See and Lorex even has somewhat sensible technical support (albeit still essentially useless).
 
OK, it's still not definite whether the issue is the cameras or the NVR. It is statistically unlikely all the cameras have an issue unless something wrong with the firmware. Either way, I was hoping more diagnosis revealed a solution that held. I understand you naturally want to the system to work like it said it was supposed to work.

If this were me I would get a POE switch. Get the cameras off the NVR POE subnet, give all of them static IP addresses, then add them to the NVR via the menu. Do not put the cameras directly to the NVR.

I had a camera dropping issue with my 858. I don't know what the root cause was, but over the course of a year, I grew to hate that NVR with a passion. The flaky POE subnet, the dropped camera and no recordings, the difficulty in exporting videos, the subpar performance. After I started researching and just thinking about what I could replace or eliminate to change the condition of my problem, I wanted to take the same cameras, but make them available on my entire network for diagnostic purposes. Which was odd, because in this step was when I realized that the NVR did not drop the cameras as long as the cameras were not connected directly to the NVR. I had changed my cameras to static IP, put them on a POE switch, with the original intent of finding an alternative for the NVR (ie Blue Iris dedicated PC).

This was a solution that worked for ME, YOUR results may vary. At this point you have little to lose and much to gain, since a camera not connected to the NVR isn't recording anything, so you're at risk.

On a local level, that NVR and cameras should act exactly the same wether it is connected to the internet or not.
 
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@user328729837492

I also have a QC826, but not any QCN8093B cameras. Our cameras are a mix of old QCN7001B (from our previous QC808 NVR), a couple IPC-T2431T, and some supposed Dahua OEMs we bought previously.

I upgraded the firmware on my QC826 to the one mentioned above (20190309) when we installed it. We had similar disconnect issues with the QCN cameras. Found out our QCN camera firmware was old and installed a newer one that fixed the issue but caused some minor hiccups - mostly with config/settings changing on reboot. The other cameras are pretty much working fine.

I don't know if it's the QC826 firmware or something else - maybe camera networking config/settings/firmware - that's causing the different outcomes.

BTW, I can reach the QC826's GUI from a web browser by going to NVR'sIPaddress:85 and the camera GUIs from there by clicking the 'SETUP' tab and then clicking on the blue 'e' logo in the WEB Browse colum. One thing is our old QCN cameras require using a 32bit browser like Palemoon while the others work ok with 64bit - the NVR worked with both. Does that work for you?
 
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htfan said:
BTW, I can reach the QC826's GUI from a web browser by going to NVR'sIPaddress:85 and the camera GUIs from there by clicking the 'SETUP' tab and then clicking on the blue 'e' logo in the WEB Browse colum. One thing is our old QCN cameras require using a 32bit browser like Palemoon while the others work ok with 64bit - the NVR worked with both. Does that work for you?
Click to expand...

Pro tip!!!! That is awesome, thank you so much. It works! Not sure how, but it works. Now I don't need to mess around with separate routers and unplugging/plugging!

I've double checked with Q-See, all firmware is up to date. I guess it will just be up to the user to workaround via reboot, shut down, wait, etc....

And thank you to msquared, yes I plan on getting a POE switch once we relocate the NVR. I will keep the POE switch where all the Cat5 terminates now, and move the NVR somewhere else.

Thank you again!
 
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