troubleshooting cameras outage

kontech

Young grasshopper
Joined
Jan 8, 2017
Messages
32
Reaction score
12
As of Friday morning a bunch of cameras seemed to have gone offline. They were unavailable in exacq vision NVR but pingable. We had the staff replace the PoE switch thinking if was the root cause to no avail.
Upon further examination, it turned out that most of the problematic cameras are Arecont Vision (single, dual and quad sensors), some of which are online but produce image with pinkish hue or similar distortion. Firmware update seems to fix the problem with pink hue on Arecont cameras, but it doesn't really explain the cause of the outage.
All 60 cameras are on its own LAN, running on multiple dedicated unmanaged PoE switches.
NVR is running latest exacq vision software on public facing Windows Enterprise box, which could have been compromised. Initial logs review doesn't indicate any unusual activity though.
Other than isolating the problem to switch specific segments what else can do done do discern the root cause?
 

00Buck

Known around here
Joined
Jan 17, 2016
Messages
219
Reaction score
420
Location
Indiana
You might try rebooting some of the individual cameras, if there was a power issue the IR filters may have stuck and a reboot (power cycle) might reset it.
 

SpacemanSpiff

Known around here
Joined
Apr 15, 2021
Messages
1,456
Reaction score
2,431
Location
USA
Identify one of the offline cameras, and ensure you can login to the cameras web gui.

If successful, find the camera in the settings of exacq system, and re-enter the camera credentials.

edit: determined someone was assigned to update camera credentials via the web gui, and when the exacq NVR did not lose connection, they did not complete the credential update in exacq settings. It was several weeks later when the connection loss finally occurred on the NVR
 
Last edited:

kontech

Young grasshopper
Joined
Jan 8, 2017
Messages
32
Reaction score
12
Well, this had nothing to do with credentials as all cameras were set w/o password. Interestingly, some cameras were accessible (ping) from the switch directly connected but not from upstream switches as if ARP tables were not updating across switches. After power cycling the switches, updating Arecont firmware and defaulting problematic cameras they started working in NVR again. No changes had to be made in Exacq. Let's see if this holds up.
 
Top