- Apr 30, 2017
- 14
- 5
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.
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.
Last edited: