Migrating HV cams from NVR subnet to LAN subnet

[carpii]

I have a Hikvision NVR (DS-7608NI-E2/8P/A) with 6 HV cams.
I've been a little unhappy with the NVR for some time, so have finally got round to buying an 8-port PoE switch, which will allow me to explore other options like BlueIris.


Right now though, I'm trying to just configure one of the cams to have an IP on my LAN subnet (192.168.1.0/24) instead of the NVR dishing out IPs for the cams
The NVR isnt happy with the cam having a LAN IP.
It seems to want to act as a DHCP server for all of the cams, and put them on its own internal subnet of 192.168.254.0/24


The steps I took..


Log into the cam itself, and update it to have an IP of 192.168.1.231
Log into the NVR web gui, and change the cam (in this case D04), to be registered Manually instead of Plug and Play
Update the registered IP of D04 cam to 192.168.1.231 so the NVR knows where to look


The NVR reports then reports the camera as being offline, with a Network Abnormal error.


Interestingly, the NVR has Virtual Host enabled, and when I try to access it via the ip and port the NVR provides, it does connect directly to the cam, so the NVR seems to know the cam is online


What am I missing here? Is it just not possible to have the cams on my LAN subnet, aswell as feeding into the NVR?


Thanks



This shows the way my cabling is now set up, but prior to making any changes on the NVR or cam

Changing D04 CAM to manually set IP

After updating the CAM IP, NVR claims its offline, yet offers a working vhost url for the cam...

 

[alastairstevenson]

I'd take the same steps, and expect it to work.
So, a couple of questions:
Is the default gateway on the D04 camera set as 192.168.1.1? (presuming that is your LAN router/gateway IP address)
Is the PoE switch connection to the NVR LAN port, not a PoE port?
Can you access the camera web GUI via a browser, and does it show up as you'd expect using SADP?

Something needs a kick - maybe if it's feasible, shut down and power cycle the NVR. And the camera (again).
I think we've seen 'network abnormal' errors on cameras cleared by a reset to defaults (2 levels of reset available) but worth exporting the camera settings if going to that extreme.

 

[carpii]

I'd take the same steps, and expect it to work.
Something needs a kick

Turns out its me who needs a kick :laugh:
I was starting to think I was attempting the impossible, but really I should have gone back and checked the basic steps..

My house was only recently cabled with cat5, and so instead of connecting my new PoE into the router, it seems I just picked up one of the cat5 cables which is wired to an unused port downstairs and plugged that into the switch. So the PoE actually had no connectivity to the LAN at all

I've now hooked up the PoE switch up to my router like I thought it was, and its all working great

Thanks so much!

 

[alastairstevenson]

Turns out its me who needs a kick :laugh:

Lol!
Well, we've all done that at some time.
Full marks for posting the solution.

 

[riceandbeans]

@carpii - thanks for posting this up, very helpful. Can you please confirm:

1. 'Status' field within DS-7608NI-E2/8P/A IP cam configuration interface reads 'Online' with D04 on 192.168.1.0/24 subnet?
2. No functionality of D04 has been lost as a result of having it on a non-NVR subnet?

 

[carpii]

@carpii - thanks for posting this up, very helpful. Can you please confirm:

1. 'Status' field within DS-7608NI-E2/8P/A IP cam configuration interface reads 'Online' with D04 on 192.168.1.0/24 subnet?

Yes, all cams are now showing as 'Online' despite being on the same subnet as the NVR itself.

2. No functionality of D04 has been lost as a result of having it on a non-NVR subnet?

Not that I've noticed. Everything seems to be working as it was before.

Here is a screenshot of my NVR config right now...

As you can see, each cam is on my 192.168.1.0/24 LAN subnet, and the NVR is still accessible via 192.168.1.230

The NVR also provides VHOST url's for each cam (in the 'Connect' column).
Previously this was the only way I could access each cam in a browser, but its no longer necessary and I will soon just disable the 'Virtual Host' feature on my NVR

If you are thinking of doing something similar, you can learn form the mistakes I made which I had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting
I accidentally set two cams with a conflicting IP, so had to isolate them one by one to see what the problem was.

I would advise...
Before you do anything, make a note of each cam, its MAC address, its current IP and which 'device number' and port the NVR associates with it.
There was a few times when I had to unplug a cam from the PoE switch and back into the NVR, and then set it back to Plug and Play just so I could access the web gui for the cam (allowing me to change its static ip and make sure the gateway was set properly).

Then migrate one camera at a time. First log into the camera and update its IP, being sure to also specify the gateway
I found my cams would not reliably get the default gateway from DHCP so I ended up assigning static IP's to each cam, which let me also specify the gateway manually.
As the cam is rebooting, hop onto the NVR and change it from Plug and Play to Manual, then tap in the IP you assigned to it.
Be sure to fill in the admin password again, even though it shows a password is filled in with asterisks, I'm not convinced it was retrieving it properly.

Only move onto the next cam once the cam has rebooted and the NVR has identified it, and can access it.
I would have saved myself a couple of hours had I followed this, but instead I tried to do too much at once, and ended up in a bit of a mess

The PoE switch I opted for was a Netgear GS110TP .... http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MHLUS8E?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=od_aui_detailpages02
I'm pretty happy with it.

So right now I have my NVR recording my cams 24/7 as it has always done, but I've also set up Blue Iris which is also monitoring a few of the cams at the same time, and recording video clips when intrusion detection is triggered.
Its a bit of a waste of bandwidth, but Im just trialling Blue Iris at the moment. I suspect I'll ditch the NVR once Im happy with BI.

[EDIT: One final thing I just tested was that my iPad VMS-4200 app could still stream the cams via the NVR.
This still works very well, I didn't even have to reconfigure it in any way (I guess it just works by asking the NVR for each cams address, rather than storing the IP and port for each cam you registered).

Hope this helps!

 

[alastairstevenson]

Lots of useful info!
Here is something worth doing when you have finalised the setup:
In the Maintenance menu of the NVR, export the device and IPC configurations and save them in a safe place, annotated with the NVR firmware version.
And if you want to ditch your NVR my way I can PM you my address.

 

[carpii]

Lots of useful info!
Here is something worth doing when you have finalised the setup:
In the Maintenance menu of the NVR, export the device and IPC configurations and save them in a safe place, annotated with the NVR firmware version.

Great tip, thanks. I;d hate to have to go through all that again :nightmare:

And if you want to ditch your NVR my way I can PM you my address.

Cool! I may well be interested in selling it on at some point.

I invested quite heavily in the HikVision NVR (8TB WD storage mostly to future-proof it, rather than it being immediately necessary), so I need to be sure I want rid of it first though.
To be fair the NVR is pretty good, but just a few firmware revisions would turn it from good to awesome. I cant help thinking there seems to be a bit of a communication barrier between home retail consumers and HikVision R&D IMO. I've reached out to HikVision support via a few avenues, but have never had any sort of response for any of my queries, which is a shame.

Mac support is becoming a little patchy too, which is unfortunate, but mostly down to OSX and all the browsers ditching support for the required plugin architecture.

My main gripes are that the intrusion detection features can send email alerts, but wont attach thumbnail images (whereas motion detection can, albeit tiny little 320*200 ones).
I've yet to get any sort of iOS push notifications working in their 'VMS' app either, despite following the docs lots of times.
Consequently, trying to view an incident after an email alert is laborious on a Mac too, you basically have to load up the desktop software and manually set the date range, and then manaully seek to the exact time contained in the email. All this just to find out a spider crawled on your lens :laugh:
It could have been made so much easier with just a little more development

First impressions of BlueIris are pretty impressive, but I'm just running their Windows software on a VMware ESXi Server at the moment which isn't really doing it justice.
I think my next step is to play around with it a bit more and then buy a barebones server I can just run BlueIris on, in which case I'll drop you a message to see if you're interested

If you've a price in mind please let me know (Its a DS-7608NI-E2/8P/A, Bought from authorised UK reseller so no messing about with Chinese firmware upgrades (already has V3.2.1), and 2 * 4TB WD enterprise drives (Red or Purple, I wont know unless I open it up).

Cheers