From what I’ve been able to glean from the Forums, iCam doesn’t work “out of the box” for some DSL setups, but it generally does (always?) for cable setups. The problem may be related to the fact that some ISPs supply modems with router functions built-in, and some do not.
Most people have external routers to provide WiFi and multiple Ethernet ports. That router is set up to hand out addresses to equipment connected to it through a protocol called DHCP. This is great, because you can add or remove equipment and the router gives it an address without you having to do anything. However, if the modem also is a router and has DHCP functions enabled, your network can get confused. And more to the point here, the iCam "zero-configuration" logic can get confused.
(Aside: I one had a Westell modem, which had router functions, feeding a Linksys router. Both had DHCP on, and both were trying to assign IP addresses to the same equipment. Very confusing! Ordinarily this does not happen unless they have been set to start handing out addresses at the same starting address, which was the case here.)
So, if iCam works on your WiFi system but not on Edge, 3G, or other WiFi systems, the problem may be that you have two routers and the iCam "zero-configuration" logic cannot pierce the firewalls of both of them. All you can do is to fix this manually, by setting up your camera and your computer with fixed IP addresses and forwarding the ports as described by SKJM.
Here’s what I did:
Turn off the DHCP function for the second downstream router. In my case, I had a Netopia modem supplied by AT&T/Bellsouth feeding an Apple Time Capsule, which is essentially an Airport Extreme router. AT&T does NOT want you to mess with that modem unnecessarily, and in any event their customer support is not as good as SKJM’s. So I set the Apple router up in Bridge mode, which disables the Apple modem’s DHCP service. All IP addresses are then set by the Netopia.
Next, you have to set fixed IP addresses for the computer and the camera. The IP address of the camera is set by the application that comes with it (Windoze only for the Linksys camera). I set it to 192.168.1.155, which Linksys says is a common address for WebCams.
Use the Expert mode of the modem/router to set the IP address of the Mac computer. While you’re at it, check the DHCP range to make sure you’re not potentially handing out addresses that might interfere with the camera. My defaults were for the modem/router to hand out 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.253. Since I am unlikely to ever have 253 pieces of equipment on my network, I told it to only hand out the range 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.100. Thus the camera at 192.168.1.155 is safe.
Reboot everything in order of signal flow – modem, router, computer, and peripherals. Make sure you can still do everything you could when you had all DHCP addresses.
Get into the Expert mode of the modem/router again and setup Port Forwarding as described by SKLM. Enter the code described by SKJM via Terminal (defaults write com.skjm.icamsource PortRangeSet -bool true) into your Mac. Turn on Port Fowarding in iCam Source.
This approach worked for me. Hope it helps someone else.
