Remote Wireless Webcams

[Stefan]

Wow, OUAnthony! Merry Christmas indeed!

[Icamuser]

Thanks Anthony.  That is a lot of material you put together.  At the moment I do not have the extra PC to leave at the remote site. The PC now there is coming back with me to be used at home.  So my intent is to plug the remote cameras directly into the remote router and run iCamSource on my home PC connecting to the remote IP addresses or names via DDNS within the remote router. I think the router will handle checking for a change in the building IP by the cable Co. It has not changed in several years. Now that I mentioned this I will be cursed with a ride on the IP carousel.

I like the idea of having the backup PC with remote control, perhaps when I retire one of the PC's and I do have the Dropbox already in use. I thought I would test the remote "system" by using the wireless connection and my iCamSource laptop at the Bookstore 4 doors down the street. In theory if I can connect to the new cameras from the Bookstore, I should be able to connect to the same cameras from 700 miles away.

With this snowstorm moving in I may have to wait to try this. Gives me some more time I guess to look at remote router settings to handle two way traffic with the 3 or 4 cameras.

[Icamuser]

I am going out to shovel the snow. It certainly would be more productive that getting these Linksys WVC80N cameras working.  Got one working, the install program then does not see it while setting up the other one. Reset cameras, restart, the Linksys monitoring program used to see the first one, now shows both exist but they are ofline. Reboot, do over, blah blah blah.  I can understand why the return line is so long at BestBuy today.

Bah Humbag.

[Stefan]

I am assuming that these cameras are all on an internal network being assigned internal 192.168.x.x IPs, correct? Could it be that multiple cameras are attempting to use the same IP? If they are setup to use DHCP then they shouldn't, but that might be one thing to check.

Also, if you are connecting to them from outside of your network using the external IP address or a dyndns name, they probably all are using the same external IP / name (if they are on the same internal network) so in that case you would need to use different internal / external port pairs when doing your port forwarding as well.

If your problem is networking related (and not just bad camera hardware) then those might be things to check when one camera works but the others do not.

[Icamuser]

Good Morning Stefan.  I think you are right, there might be IP contention.  I am installing these on my home net to learn about them and find issues.  I am not even trying to send the images to my iPhone via iCam, just getting the cameras to work. I was using the Linksys/Cisco provided software as they say in the package, "Start Here".  It worked for one camera but doing the process again for the second started a mess.

Perhaps the best would be to go to static IP's in the home net and assign the PC's and cameras their IP. My wife uses her desktop intermittantly and so my laptop and her PC get assigned 100 or 101 depending who gets there first. If she was jumping in and out while I was screwing around with the cameras this could be a problem.

So off to attempt to change all to static. I have not established a DDNS account yet as I do not have the current remote IP address. So first convert to static, get cameras working, get connection to iPhone working, get control connection from Internet to remote router and cameras.

If the weather breaks, I may be on the road.

[Icamuser]

After a 16 hour drive I am back to playing with my WVC80N's and a new Netgear n300 router.  Plan is to get the cameras working on the router/PC before connecting to the cable/internet.  Lots of snow.

[Icamuser]

Well I finally got the two Linksys WVC80N cameras working on the XP PC and I can use both in iCamSource 1.4.2.6 Beta.  I have not tried to configure the new Netgear wireless n router yet for connection to iPhone.

The Plug and Pray CD with the install software that came with the cameras would only run to just after the notice that it had configured the wireless and would now test the connect where it consistantly stopped with error 101 where it suggested you start over.

Thru much trial and error I got the cameras working by first doing part of the install via the browser, then using the install CD till the error and then going back to the browser.  The "monitor" software that came as part of the install CD would show the camera existed but always reported them offline.

Interesting to note that when one looks at Devices Attached in the Netgear router, the names of the cameras are either one letter short, or one camera is still called Camera, or blank name or ycamera for My camera.  I have named one of the cameras Boilers, it shows up in the router as oilers.  Yes I have tried rebooting the router/cameras.

At this point I am not going to leave them at the remote location- no enough time to test longer term reliability. So the PC/DVR stays and I will further abuse the Linksys cams at home since I have 30 days at Best Buy to return them. I am making arrangements for a neighbor to come in and beat on the Windows PC/DVR to intimidate it

This will give me more time to setup the remote control, Dropbox etc as per the directions Anthony put together.

Happy and Healthy New Year to all iCam fans.

[Stefan]

Thanks for the update, and a Happy New Year to you as well!