miljamitv

Well, after many hours spent troubleshooting, I have found the following with IQeye: 1, there is a timing issue with IQeye's 700 and 800 series cameras from firmware 3.0/0 to 3.0/8. We have many firmware flavors out there, 2.0/8 is most stable. According to IQeye, (IQeye sent a tech to our shop in Norway to help troubeshoot), firmware version 3.0/9 fixes the issue. We will see................. 2, Possibly because of the timing issues, the switches began to do funny things, routing packets incorrectly through the network. Also, we found "phantom" MAC addresses in some switches ports. Ports where there should be only one MAC address listed but yet there will be two for a few minutes. The phantom mac address does not exist on the network at all. The only way we remedy the problem is to reboot all the switches at the same time and by doing that all the arp tables will be deleted so no switch can inherit the "old" tables. We only experiance these issues when IQeye is connected. I wrote a script and use a telnet program with macro capabilities to reboot SRW208P Linksys switches from the PC. If your switch supports telnet and or CLI, LCLI its doable. 3, Hardware issues from IQeye. There is a bad batch of camera sensors with IQeye so when you get a white background in the webpage, thats a bad image sensor. Send it back. Also, with the 85X series, the IR filter motor craps out. Sends those back too, otherwise you may get pink pictures or a big ugly stick in the middle of your image. Nothing worse than replacing a sleeping camera with new, only to find out the IR filter is bad. I had four new boxes, 852's, brand new, bad IR filters. I was not happy. Needles to say, we are taking a break from IQeye for a while and sticking with Sanyo, Axis and Sony. I got to say, Sanyo has been pretty stable.

Happens on Qnap ans NUUVU too. The issues started to become more often about a year ago.

Milestone

Actually, every 511 we ever installed works.

Yeah, many upgrades later same crap different firmware. We have installed about 500 IQeye cameras if not much more. Seems recently we have been sending back many of them. Which switch do you use mostly with IQeye? For us it doesnt seem to matter which switch. We use mainly Linksys but seen the issue with Netgear, HP Pro curve, Cisco and customer owned. I got a client with 96 IP cameras, 55 of them Sony of many sorts, 37 are Sanyo domes and 4 of them IQeye. The install isnt older than 4 months and we had to replace one IQeye852 already. This one went into a coma. Lights on but nobody home. Nothing I could do to get it back to life. All the other cameras 100% stable. We would usually use IQeye for the whole job but didntfor this one because of the past issues. So Sanyo and Sony it was and used the 4 IQeye for the light posts. I have another client with 132 IP cameras. 120 of them are IQeye. We often go there to reboot switches so cameras would come back online or sometimes to replace them. Ive gotten to the point where I wrote a telnet script and use software where the client can click a "button" and reboot a switch for cameras that have gone down. sucks and it looks bad. I have a shopping mall with 93 cameras, mix of IQeye, Axis and Sanyo. Same issue here going back to reboot swithes to get IQeye cameras working again. Oh by the way, the 800 series cameras are redone 700 series cameras. We have open them up and to our surprise same main board with some minor hardware changes. I like IQeye, easy to install and the picture quality is pretty good but......

No one huh?

Hmmm, Macs, I love Macs i own 3. Take a look at http://www.securityspy.com/ They have software for Mac computers so if you have a MacPro or a Xserve with Xsan this may be a good solution for you. You may want to check their camera driver list to make sure your cameras are supported. I think their solution is less costly then the Windows types. Its 500 pounds for unlimited cameras and the concept of splitting up cameras on several servers should work here too. Think the only draw back is it may not be as tweak-able as the Windows based systems. I have seen Exaqvision but I dont know it well enough to help you. I do know it supports a Mac client which is very nice, Milestone cant, at least not yet. If you have an IT background as I do, this may be an option, not just for Milestone either: I have installed VirtualBox on Macs and Linux machines and built a Windows VM so i could run Smart Client from Milestone. In fact you can build one Windows VM and export it, load it on the other macs and then your in. The original Windows install will take as long a any other Windows installation but the export takes 10-20 minutes to import into a new machine. All your settings will be exactly the same. You will have to update your Windows license so if you have a open license account with MS this is not an issue You can run the Windows VM in seamless mode and have both environments running at the same time. Its very cool. VirtualBox is open source (free) and dont forget to load the extension pack so you can share the hardware between your Mac and Windows

So you charge 1 hour service for a 130 camera install? Hahaha! Good point! But no of course not. You have to remember the rest of the install too you know:-) Lots of wire to pull, building the servers, switches to setup with security/trunking, making sure all the links between the remote locations and the head end is working and stable.......... then when all is fine, Milestone config. Besides, it isnt me that quotes the jobs;-) I install and service them.

User friendly and easy to install are not thinks that come to mind with Milestone. Can you give an example of why? We have installed many Milesotne versions in the past 3 years and 99% of the end users here find Smart Client very easy. I can setup 130 IP cameras on an Enterprise system in about an hour. This is of course the cameras are all mounted, servers built, network is in order and you have all your naming conventions down for your cameras. That you would for any system anyway. Ive done it.

I was wondering if anyone on here has experianced any issues with IQeye? Cameras going to sleep, some in a coma or just dead. Concerning 700 and 800 series cameras. Ive been struggling for a while with a lot of installs with IQeye. Other cameras are stable like Sanyo, Axis and Sony..... Thanks!

Actually Milestone is OK. Its very user friendly and really easy to install. If you have 44 IP cameras and want to put it all on one system something like Milestone Profesional would be perfect. You can install up to 64 cameras on professional and you can install it on several PCs to split up the cameras. Using a PC along side a NAS is a bad idea especially if you are going to put all archives and recordings on it. You will want as much bandwidth as you can get form your system and using a NAS with 44 IP cameras will help kill that. I installed many a Milestone systems and the problem I come across most is making sure the PC or server can handle the processing and sending data to the disks. Proper calculations will give you a stable system. Good high RPM disks with high throughput helps too. How will your network be setup? Is this install just one building or several connected together? POE cameras? How are you going to view the cameras? You can split the cameras up on 2 PC's with using the same SLC license from Milestone. Every camera you register will create a "DLK" and since this is one install you can put 22 cameras on one PC and 22 on the other. all DLK's are linked to its SLC.