Need help installing 1 camera

[Hawk1891]

Hello, it's been awhile since I was on here. I moved about two years ago and tried to reinstall my poe camera
IPC-HFW8232EP-ZE but I got stuck on setting things up. At the other house I had a friend help me over the internet and I forgot what he typed in and did. I have the ethernet cables and poe injector. I'm wanting to connect the camera directly to my laptop which is running Win10 and use either the laptops storage or I have a 1tb external hard drive that I could use but not sure if it would be better or just use the computers storage.
I just need instructions or pointed in the right direction to a page on here to get started. I'm not computer savvy at all and just know basic things. If someone could please help me I would be greatly appreciative. Thanks and kind regards.

 

[TonyR]

Insure the POE injector complies with 802.3af/at
Find the cam's reset button; it may be behind a door where the cam's SD card goes.
Power up the cam with the POE injector ("POE" port on injector to cam).
Press and hold the reset button for about 15 seconds, then let go.
Power the cam down (unplug the POE cable)
Set your laptop/PC to a static IP of 192.168.1. XXX (XXX = any number but 108), subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
Plug a cable from the "LAN" port of the POE injector to the LAN port of your laptop.
Plug the camera back into the "POE" port of the POE injector.
Wait a full minute.
Open a browser on the laptop and type in 192.168.1.108, hit <enter>; the cam's built in webGUI should open.

 

[Hawk1891]

Insure the POE injector complies with 802.3af/at
Find the cam's reset button; it may be behind a door where the cam's SD card goes.
Power up the cam with the POE injector ("POE" port on injector to cam).
Press and hold the reset button for about 15 seconds, then let go.
Power the cam down (unplug the POE cable)
Set your laptop/PC to a static IP of 192.168.1. XXX (XXX = any number but 108), subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
Plug a cable from the "LAN" port of the POE injector to the LAN port of your laptop.
Plug the camera back into the "POE" port of the POE injector.
Wait a full minute.
Open a browser on the laptop and type in 192.168.1.108, hit <enter>; the cam's built in webGUI should open.

Thank you very much for responding and sorry for late reply. I will try these instructions today after I get home from work. Thanks and I will let you know when I get to the end of your instructions. Kind Regards

 

[Hawk1891]

Insure the POE injector complies with 802.3af/at
Find the cam's reset button; it may be behind a door where the cam's SD card goes.
Power up the cam with the POE injector ("POE" port on injector to cam).
Press and hold the reset button for about 15 seconds, then let go.
Power the cam down (unplug the POE cable)
Set your laptop/PC to a static IP of 192.168.1. XXX (XXX = any number but 108), subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
Plug a cable from the "LAN" port of the POE injector to the LAN port of your laptop.
Plug the camera back into the "POE" port of the POE injector.
Wait a full minute.
Open a browser on the laptop and type in 192.168.1.108, hit <enter>; the cam's built in webGUI should open.

Hello, I wanted to get back to you and let you know that I finally got the camera to work. I actually had to look up online on how to find my computers IP address and all that kind of stuff. I'm really not computer savvy at all but am learning as I go. But anyway I managed to get it working. I'm not connected to the internet either. I still need to learn how to change the IP address and maybe even use a VPN or something else to secure the camera from the internet and secure my router. My router right now is secure but if I leave the camera on and have the internet on it will leave my whole system vulnerable. I'm assuming anyway. I'll try tinkering with the camera a bit and get it setup and if I have anymore questions I'll post them here. Thanks again. Cheers

 

[TonyR]

Hello, I wanted to get back to you and let you know that I finally got the camera to work. I actually had to look up online on how to find my computers IP address and all that kind of stuff. I'm really not computer savvy at all but am learning as I go. But anyway I managed to get it working. I'm not connected to the internet either. I still need to learn how to change the IP address and maybe even use a VPN or something else to secure the camera from the internet and secure my router. My router right now is secure but if I leave the camera on and have the internet on it will leave my whole system vulnerable. I'm assuming anyway. I'll try tinkering with the camera a bit and get it setup and if I have anymore questions I'll post them here. Thanks again. Cheers

Great!
We humans can only ingest so much verbal instruction, which is normal; most of us (me included) learn best by doing, getting our hands dirty so to speak and even stubbing our toe sometimes. The important thing is to not stop trying.

Generally, your router's LAN IP is also your gateway IP; if you log into your cam, if you insure that under its network setting you have no gateway IP, or the gateway IP is NOT the same as the router's LAN IP, that should keep the cam from accessing the network for now. In other words, if your router's LAN IP (gateway IP) is 192.168.1.1, in the cam's network settings set the default gateway to an IP that is OUTSIDE of the router's DHCP pool. Also put that IP into the Preferred DNS setting.

 

[Hawk1891]

Ok I checked and it is the same as the routers IP. So I tried to change it but it kept going back to the same numbers. I'm a computer dummy when it involves network and routers. Especially when trying to change things. So for now I'll just keep the laptop in airplane mode and the cameras Ethernet offline. So there's no way anyone can get into the camera as it's not online nor is the laptop. But anyway thank you for helping me get the camera at least running. I also found the folder that it was saving video and pictures to. So I put a quick link on my desktop to be able to access the output videos and pics. Kind Regards and Cheers

 

[TonyR]

As stated at the end in my post #5..." in the cam's network settings set the default gateway to an IP that is OUTSIDE of the router's DHCP pool. Also put that IP into the Preferred DNS setting. "

• Log into the router with it's LAN IP.
• Find the DHCP server settings and see the range of IP's in its pool.
• Pick an IP that is NOT in that pool.
• Put that IP into the gateway and preferred DNS.