Troubleshooting, Hardware replacement advice needed

[Spektyr]

Okay, so I get home from an absolutely hellish week pulling cable at a hotel that's 100% hard-deck to find my #3 camera on the home surveillance system isn't working.

It's there. It's powered on. I can hit the IP address and get the login, but it doesn't accept any password - not mine, and not the default (so it didn't get reset). Normally I'd break out the ladder, pull it down, and manually reset it but...

1. I'm exhausted and don't want to think about cameras after last week.
2. This is a LaView system that was what I could afford when I installed it.

So part of me is thinking I should just take some of that money I earned from last week's 12+ hour days and upgrade some/all of the cameras around the house. Putting in new cameras is decidedly more "fun" than fixing broken ones.

Option 1: Troubleshooting.

I've already rebooted the NVR and unplugged/plugged in the camera at the switch (rebooting it, since everything is PoE). No dice. I've seen similar behavior from consumer-grade routers where they "lose" the password they're set up on and have to be hard reset. I'm guessing that's what's needed here.

Has anyone else seen something like this with an IP camera and/or have additional information I should consider before I decide to try resetting this thing?

Option 2: "Product Testing".

As I said, I'm thinking about replacing this camera and probably at least one other with better models. I do know that individual hardware doesn't generally appear with only one brand logo on it (my LaView NVR is actually a Hikvision IIRC.) This pair I'm considering are front of the house, each looking off to one side with overlap in the middle. They watch my property and the street. The neighbors know I have cameras so every single time something happens, or is thought to have happened, someone knocks on the door asking if I have footage of it. Someone mowed down two trees on your side yard half a block down and around the corner? No, I didn't get a license plate at 4am. Sorry. I barely caught the vehicle on frame at all. (And with my cameras if someone backed up into my driveway and aimed their license plate at the camera I wouldn't be able to read it at night because the IR illuminators on the camera would completely wash out the reflective paint on the plate.)

Shorter version: I would like nicer cameras and if I get 1-2 I can think of it as "testing" which cameras I like best for later replacements of more cameras around the house. What I don't know is how the various brands typically stack up. I am reading up on this, but I'm also being asked to do about a million other things within the general realm of data security and haven't had time to really focus on this. So advice is greatly appreciated.

Option 3: Spend all the money

One concern I have on Option 2 is that if I get a couple 6MP cameras my POS LaView NVR is going to have a mild heart-attack trying to process and record all that input. It's an LV-N9808C8E so the spec is 2MP @ 30fps support.

So I'm also looking for advice on replacing that NVR with something better. I do have some resources not found in the average home (an ESXi server for one, that's generally under-utilized.) I can spin up a VM to do NVR work if that would make sense, but I do like having dedicated purpose-built hardware. For one thing it keeps my server free for the testing I do sometimes for work.

What would be the recommendations you guys would have? I'd like more than 8 channels, though I don't currently have need of more (or any, really) PoE ports on the new hardware. One PoE port died on the NVR so I got a switch to replace it entirely for powering the cameras. I only actually need 8 channels though. I need hardware that can handle bigger video streams if I want to upgrade the cameras. I've been doing a lot of Dahua install recently so it might be good to stick with that as far as learning new things...

But I've come to passionately dislike basically every interface I've seen so far on cameras. It might be worth it to shell out some extra money just to get something that is reliable, powerful, and has a good feature set. Like I want to have the granular control I come to expect as a hard-core nerd, but still be able to install an app for it on my wife's phone that doesn't take me an hour or more to explain to her.

Oh, and support. LaView support actually told me that their software doesn't do email notifications on motion detection. It does, and it obviously does because there's a whole section of the interface devoted to it. I was having a minor technical issue that I asked them for clarification on and they told me their software didn't do that. (On a related note, it would be nice if they had the option to select the size of preview picture that's sent.) Does anyone provide decent support? Or documentation either originally written in English, or translated to it by a native speaker?


So long story long...

I'm looking for advice about all this crap above. I do need to learn all the things about all the things, but I don't have time today and the rest of the week/month is booked pretty solid as well, so some help narrowing it down to a few items to research would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea whether I'm going to prefer a short-term immediate solution or just start rebuilding the whole system with top-notch (or reasonably so) parts so I don't have to mess with it in another 3 years.

 

[alastairstevenson]

I do know that individual hardware doesn't generally appear with only one brand logo on it (my LaView NVR is actually a Hikvision IIRC.)

Is there any chance that the camera is re-branded Hikvision also?
If so - a very long shot - try the passwords 1111aaaa and asdf1234 for the admin user.

 

[Spektyr]

Forgot to mention: I also have a NAS on site with several terabytes of free space and the whole place is running 1GB LAN.

The camera in question is an LV-PD50208 - no idea who actually makes it.

 

[Spektyr]

I have been kind of looking at the Dahua IPC-HDW4631C-A, but there are so many models I have difficulty figuring out what the differences really are. One ongoing issue I have with the LV-PD50208's is water spots on the dome that make the night-vision basically useless. My guess is that the smaller lens on the Dahua eyeball style camera, combined with it facing downward, might translate to getting less crap on the lens which in turn means fewer trips up a ladder with a spray bottle and microfiber cloth.

 

[alastairstevenson]

I can hit the IP address and get the login, but it doesn't accept any password

Just for fun - and certainly a bit of a long-shot - hit the camera IP address using this URL in the browser, changing the IP address to suit:
http://<camera_IP_address>/System/configurationFile?auth=YWRtaW46MTEK

If it coughs up a file - zip it up and attach here and I'll decrypt and decode and extract the password for you.

 

[Spektyr]

So you're correct, the cameras are Hikvision as well. The second password worked so I was able to get in and change the password back.

That's getting added to my documentation now.

Back online - Thanks for the help!

(but now I don't have a really good excuse to get better hardware...)

 

[alastairstevenson]

So you're correct, the cameras are Hikvision as well. The second password worked so I was able to get in and change the password back.

That's good - and bad!

It suggests that the camera had been hacked, probably by the use of the 'Hikvision backdoor' in the firmware.
If you did not explicitly configure port-forwarding on your router - maybe the camera did this bad thing this of its own accord.
Check if UPnP is enabled on both your router and on the camera.
If so - best disable it.
Allowing the entire internet in to a very vulnerable IoT device such as a camera with a gaping backdoor is such a big risk to the LAN and all the devices and data on it.

 

[Spektyr]

Looks like I missed that camera's checkbox. Thanks.

 

[Spektyr]

Somewhat related - the LaView app used to have a P2P thing for adding the NVR so it could be viewed from the internet (scanning the QR code). That section is missing from the current version, and adding a device with the QR code option doesn't work (it beeps like it scans the code, but says there's no information).

I could port forward to the NVR on the firewall and then hit it from the Internet with my public IP address but if the NVR is as secure as the cameras that's probably not a good idea. Is a VPN the best solution or is there some other built-in option I'm not seeing to securely and remotely connect to this unit? Do I even care if I'm thinking about possibly upgrading it anyway?

 

[mat200]

Somewhat related - the LaView app used to have a P2P thing for adding the NVR so it could be viewed from the internet (scanning the QR code). That section is missing from the current version, and adding a device with the QR code option doesn't work (it beeps like it scans the code, but says there's no information).

I could port forward to the NVR on the firewall and then hit it from the Internet with my public IP address but if the NVR is as secure as the cameras that's probably not a good idea. Is a VPN the best solution or is there some other built-in option I'm not seeing to securely and remotely connect to this unit? Do I even care if I'm thinking about possibly upgrading it anyway?

warning: DO NOT port forward unless you like your LAN owned by a hijacker...

 

[fenderman]

I have been kind of looking at the Dahua IPC-HDW4631C-A, but there are so many models I have difficulty figuring out what the differences really are. One ongoing issue I have with the LV-PD50208's is water spots on the dome that make the night-vision basically useless. My guess is that the smaller lens on the Dahua eyeball style camera, combined with it facing downward, might translate to getting less crap on the lens which in turn means fewer trips up a ladder with a spray bottle and microfiber cloth.

that is a crap china hacked model...I suggest doing proper research.

 

[looney2ns]

Read Wiki and Cliff Notes
DO NOT forward ports;
How to Secure Your Network (Don't Get Hacked!) | IP Cam Talk
Dahua Starlight IPC-HDW5231R-ZE 800 meter capable ePOE | IP Cam Talk
Review-dahua-ipc-hdw2231rp-zs-starlight-camera-varifocal

 

[Spektyr]

That's some good stuff, thanks.

Reading through the stuff confirms some of what I knew to start and some I learned the annoying way. For example, that dome cameras outdoors are problematic with glare and "crud" on the dome creating glare - particularly when lit by the IR illuminators. I thought that mounting under the eaves would eliminate/reduce that problem, but it doesn't.

I have good coverage from my current placement, and only two of my 4 dome cameras are really problematic for the reason above, one being the camera that sparked this whole thing. I don't need ePoE, none of my runs are even half the limit of PoE. I'd say that overall my picture quality in daylight is good, and night is passable. For people close enough to the house to be a concern I get a decent picture, but something moving fast on the street (like a car) can be a challenge to really identify at night. Sure, it's a minivan, but what model?

I use gDMSS for work since pretty much the only thing we install is Dahua NVRs with Dahua and/or Axis cameras. On the one hand that does work really nicely without port forwarding and it could be handy to have everything in one app, but on the other hand I do like keeping work and home lives separate, so I'm not 100% sold either way. I have other reasons for getting off my duff and setting up a VPN to the house anyway, so it's probably moot. One of the (all too many) things on my To Do list that keep getting put off in lieu of the Crisis Du Jour.

So the various questions in my head, in no particular order:

1. How do I learn to tell the good cameras from the decent ones, and those from the crap ones?
2. Just how crazy expensive (or personally) would it be to get some cameras that could realistically read a license plate in front of my house at night? I'm not great at gauging distance by eye, but you can park two cars deep in the driveway but a third would be in the street.
3. If I'm likely to exceed the limits, either in channels or simple bandwidth, of my current NVR what would my replacement likely be? I'm not averse to spending money - even potentially a fairly large amount of it - provided I'm getting "bang for my buck". I'm the "security nut" in my neighborhood and I'm always looking to improve both what I have protecting me and my knowledge about it. Say for example that all the "serious" camera setups use Blue Iris, well then that's probably what I want to plan to set up if for no other reason than it's something I need to learn.
4. (edit to add) As a side-note to #3, does anyone have experience running an NVR on a Virtual Machine (VM)? Also, are there any issues/concerns with using a NAS as the storage for an NVR?

Basically I've installed a few systems on my own, and quite a few more from a bill of materials handed to me. (A lot of "they're building this hotel, go install cameras, WiFi, and all the other IT infrastructure" type jobs.) I'm probably going to be relied on a lot more in the future to design those installations and oversee them rather than being the guy building out the rack and working with power tools, so I need to learn a lot in the coming months.

 

[SouthernYankee]

1)Use turret cameras. Use Dahua starlight cameras or Hikvision darkfighter cameras or ICPT Night eye cameras (https://store.ipcamtalk.com/) if you need good low light cameras.
2) Good LPR cameras are not much more expensive then the cameras above, the key is correct placement and configuration. Read the LPR forum posts, There is significant info on the forum. An LPR camera is configured to read ONLY license plates, do not expect it to provied other info.
3) most members with a number of cameras that want to do advance thing like LPR. Set up a Blue Iris system, with POE cameras.
4) Blue Iris can run on a VM pc, but it is strongly recommended to NOT do that. A single PC for BI. Up time and reliability are the most important. BI should be on a standalone PC. On my BI PC i do not do updates, I have no anti virus. Just windows and Blue Iris.

 

[JNDATHP]

4) Blue Iris can run on a VM pc, but it is strongly recommended to NOT do that. A single PC for BI. Up time and reliability are the most important. BI should be on a standalone PC. On my BI PC i do not do updates, I have no anti virus. Just windows and Blue Iris.

Nothing but BI and Windows 10. No A/V, nothing (except tightvnc), but also no open ports and we connect externally via VPN. Running headless in a guest room closet on a UPS so BI can continue recording cameras that are Poe powered by switches that also are on UPS’s.