Camera resetting to Passive
Hi - I have an interesting issue thats just cropped up. Here is my setup. SecuritySpy running on iMac connected wirelessly to Airport Express. I then have 3 x Axis M1031 cameras, 1 x D-Link DCS-933 and 1 x DCS-942 all connected wirelessly (not optimum I know) to the same network. The Wireless network is actually split over two Airports as I have a wired connection from my router to another (old) Airport Express downstairs. This airport is directly connected via the wired connection to my router and I therefore have the same SSID and password on both AP's to enable a "sort of" roaming network. Recently, I've noticed a couple of cameras have been changing from Active to Passive by themselves and then staying in Passive mode. Could this be caused by the cameras dropping the network connection due to not enough bandwidth? Many thanks - Philip
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Having another thought...looking through the logs, its clear there are network issues with some of the cameras (the ones that are switching to passive) being unable to communicate at certain times throughout the day. This hasn't normally caused any issues, however I have recently added a schedule so that the cameras are ordinarily off in the day, and scheduled to come on at night. When I go out in the day, I manually put the cameras into Active mode. If, therefore, they lose the network connection in the day, and they have a schedule set, would this schedule override the fact I had manually put the cameras into Active mode? In other words, if the cameras lose a network connection whilst they are in Active, then they regain the network connection and the schedule is such that at that point, according to the schedule, they should be inactive, that is the way they will remain?...
Kinda hard to explain so apologies for the long-windedness! -
Hi. If you don't have a schedule, and you set a camera to Active mode manually, then SecuritySpy will remember this permanently. So if there is a temporary network problem and the camera goes offline and then comes back, SecuritySpy will automatically set the camera to Active mode again.
If there is a schedule set for the camera, any manual change you make will only be remembered until the next event in the schedule.
However, if there is a connection problem and the camera is reset between the time you have manually set it to Active mode and the time of the next event in the schedule, the schedule will override the manual setting, so that if the schedule dictates that the camera should be Passive then that will be the case.
So it does look like this is what is causing the anomaly that you are seeing. I think the first thing to do would be to look at making your network more reliable. I think you should use two different names (SSIDs) for the two networks, and set each camera to use the network with the stronger signal (i.e. the closest AirPort). What could be happening now is that the cameras are connecting to the "wrong" network (the one with the weakest signal) simply because they can't tell the difference between the two networks, and this could be causing some of the unreliability.
Hope this helps!
