Soundy

This is my main point above: in most places, fire alarm technicians have to be fully trained and certified, and panel maintenance and modifications must be performed by those technicians ONLY. Imagine the liability if you go into the panel yourself and hook something up, and in the process damage or alter its proper functioning, leading to it not working properly in a fire and someone dying as a result of that. Just.... don't take the chance. It's not worth it.

Could always use the 500s for something else... being an IT guy I'm sure you have lots of uses for them Could go the other way, too - that the unit with CD has higher capacity than the one without. OR, it might be possible to add another drive in place of the CD drive... which if the drive size is limited to 300GB each, would bring you to 900GB, and the chart only goes to 825 because that follows the numbers they're using. But that's a long-shot I'd say. I dunno about DM specifically, but my experience with these types of units is that they're fairly limited in how much you can tinker with the hardware, and a connection that's meant for an optical drive will ONLY work with an optical drive (note there's nothing about a DVD drive anywhere in the brochure, suggesting that won't either). Depends how long you've been in IT, I suppose... there was a time not too long ago that a lot of PC BIOSes wouldn't support drives over ~130GB, or if they did, Windows didn't. Drives bigger than that would simply show as 130GB available.

Well, I googled "DS2A DX16C" and found a PDF of a datasheet on DM's website... in that is the following: That seems to answer your question... and it appears that a pair of 320GB drives may not work either. Immediately before that it says: So you might want to check with DM to see if there's a firmware update, either available now or planned in the future. Full document is here: http://www.dedicatedmicros.com/europe/files/support_docs/f152

Welcome!

Whoa... hardware porn!

^Agreed with Sean, in most cases resolution will trump framerate. Retention is something you need to determine for yourself. Our corporate retail clients all insist on minimum 30 days, because that's usually the minimum time it takes for fraud and employee theft to show up (after the month-end books are done). Naturally, when the cops come looking for clips, it's almost always at the 32-33 day mark. One restaurant client specs a minimum 90 days on all their sites. And one site insists on only a week (in fact, they wanted us to make it so it WOULDN'T keep more than a week).

Would help if you turned off the motion-sense display (the blue boxes)... I've used that on Capture systems a couple times, and turned it off again before long as being just too distracting. Anyway, look kinda like crosstalk to me - like the two cameras' signals are bleeding into each other. Try disconnecting the signal line from one of the two affected cameras (at the camera end, not the DVR end) and see if it clears up.

True, but again, the question is how much it will save in time and gas... I mean, how much of both do you waste now sitting in stop-and-go traffic all the way out of town in the afternoon? Guess it remains to be seen...

This should be a good start for all your camera needs: http://tinyurl.com/2dr9ewc There are both indoor and outdoor/vandal-resistant versions for both surface and flush mounting... image quality is outstanding for the price, and low-light performance is among the best you'll find anywhere in the price range. There are a number of PC-based systems you can put together yourself - GeoVision is a popular one (watch out for greymarket clones if shopping on fleaBay). You DO want to dedicate a PC to your surveillance system, and ideally install your OS and software on a separate drive from your video. Most should allow you to take trigger inputs from your alarm panel to initiate full-motion record on selected or all cameras during an alarm. Typical design is to home-run both power and video, although you can optionally power cameras locally with the appropriate transformer. You can also use Cat5e or Cat6 to carry video and power, which if you're pre-wiring a new house or a reno, can save on cable costs, as you can use the same wire for network, phone, etc. (it will work for alarm as well, although I know a lot of alarm guys don't like it, and local codes may prohibit it). It means you only need to bring in one type of cable, can pull multiple runs to each area of the house, and figure out later which you're going to use for what.

You aren't using CCTV to "look good", you're using it to capture events, possibly for use as evidence. As "nice" as 30fps looks, it's rarely necessary (especially when you keep in mind that PAL systems find 25fps sufficient, and movies have been using 24fps since long before television video standards were around). The "accepted standard or most commonly used settings" are, or SHOULD be, whatever strikes a suitable balance between video quality and retention/bandwidth requirements, on a case-by-case basis. Sure, D1@30fps would be nice for every system, but it also chews up a LOT of space, when CIF at 1fps may be plenty for a large percentage of jobs. Alas, too many people just go for the bigger-is-better idea and don't actually take the time to determine what's best suited for a particular situation. So the answer is, you need to figure out which makes the most sense FOR YOUR NEEDS, and balance it with storage and bandwidth limitations.

You know what, I say wait and see what the new roads upgrades save you in gas before getting too worked up about the tolls. My wife took a job in Langley a year before the GEB opened, knowing that the new bridge was coming... she suffered through a 37km commute that took over an hour each way and burned a quarter-tank of gas *per day*... now her commute is barely 15km, takes her less than half an hour, and uses a quarter tank of gas *per week*. The savings in gas alone are WELL worth the $5.60 daily toll, never mind having over an hour of her day back, AND the lack of the stress from fighting the Johnson Hill and Cape Horn traffic. So whereabouts do you work?

One other thing you could do, maybe semi-annually, is run a series of Prime95 benchmarks to stress-test the other hardware... things that will test I/O performance, run the CPU hard to see if the fan controls maintain temperatures properly, and so on. It's designed primarily for overclockers to test the stability of their mods. Maybe keep a log of the tests so you can compare them from one to the next and watch for any decreases in performance that could indicate pending failures.

Just a short $2.85 toll away

I'd be more worried about the glue oozing in and not coming back out.

Can you post some stills of problem? Those look like decent cameras, from the info I can find. Blown-out picture is usually a result of an incorrectly adjusted iris drive... there should be a small pot to the right of the LL/BLC DDIP switches, marked "Level" - try adjusting that to close down the iris and dim the picture a bit. Grounding the transformers have nothing to do with the problem, BTW... since transformers (assuming these are actually transformer-type adapters and not switching type) physically separate the AC line from the DC output, having a ground on them would be irrelevant.

How about a blob of gum? Personally, my preference would be to disassemble the thing and remove the camera module altogether...

Well said, Chris!

Welcome! Good to see another Lower Mainlander in here

I think daily/weekly might be a little excessive for PM. Monthly, at most... I assume these are PC-based DVRs? Are the drive arrays internal in each one, or are you running separate NAS arrays? For me, with a PC-based DVR, most of the PM I'd do would require taking the system offline - can your archive system be used as a temporary failover machine to cover for the one that's being worked on? First thing I'd do is open the thing up and check fan operations, and blow out any collected dust... in most environments I see, semi-yearly is sufficient for this; if you're running in a room with filtered air, even yearly you probably won't see much dust buildup. Next thing I do is run Memtest86+, and if I have the time, let it run a couple passes. From there, I'll run manufacturer drive diagnostics (PowerMax, DFT, SeaTools, etc.), ideally from a DOS boot disk; most now have Windows-based utilities I can run without taking the system down, but most will also be happier if nothing is accessing the drive being tested, so shutting down the DVR software is probably advisable. All the NAS arrays I've used have their own disk-test diagnostics as well, so running those every 4 or 6 months is advisable... but most will also monitor SMART status and send an email if issues are found. The newer QNAP firmwares allow you to set scheduled automatic disk tests. The other thing to watch for is capacitor plague - visually inspect the electrolytics on the motherboard for bulging tops, and if you see any, plan to replace the MOBO ASAP. Beyond that, I suggest just good monitoring... something like Speedfan can watch temperatures, fan speeds, and drive SMART statistics, and send an email if anything goes over user-defined thresholds. There are other, fancier commercial products as well, of course.

What, exactly, can't you make work? The process sounds viable (depending a bit upon the specific DVR and software), so at what point is it falling down?

I doubt you'll find a DVR/NVR that has a DHCP server, short of using a PC-based system and adding one yourself. You're running this behind a broadband router, no? So you could just let the router's DHCP server provide addressing... or just hard-code IP addresses for the cameras and DVR. Many routers provide support for DDNS services; if yours doesn't, most DVRs do as well (although some are limited to their own hosted DDNS), so that takes care of your dynamic-IP problem (unless your ISP forces regular short-term IP changes, which I have seen before). If you're not already running a broadband router, BTW, I'd strongly suggest getting even a cheap one - it adds a lot of physical network security, even if you're just running a single system behind it. Not sure what all the "significant supporting infrastructure" is you'd need for a PC-based DVR vs. a standalone... power cord, network cable... good to go. Either one will need a monitor connected to set it up locally; the only additional stuff the PC would need is a keyboard and mouse. Look at it the other way: with a PC (particularly a Windows system), you could add any number of remote-access apps (VNC, TeamViewer, Go2MyPC, RDP, etc. etc. etc.) to be able to access, setup and control the whole system remotely. You could also add something like SpeedFan to monitor various hardware (like temperature, drive SMART status, etc.) and email you if anything starts to act up. Depending on how "rural" this is, you'll probably want to put everything on a fairly hefty UPS... both for power conditioning/protection, and to keep things going for a little while if the power goes out. Switch looks good, if a bit of overkill... we use this one extensively for 3MP and 5MP cameras and find it to be a rock-solid performer: http://www.shopbot.ca/m/?m=sfe1000p. Granted, the Netgear is a 24+2 for about the same price as an 8+2 Cisco, just saying, we've used a lot of these and found they work really well, so that's a known quantity

I haven't used the email feature, but I believe SpeedFan will do what you want, and it's free.

I don't know that either is "crap" as such, but from their specs, I don't know that they're worth the price. The one at OzSpy doesn't even list a brand name - that's usually not a sign of quality.

or the modem is also a router.... I had the same problem with a customer and you have to bridge the modem/router or remove the other router. This is true, too... it would be helpful to know the model of the modem.

Note: this sort of device won't spread your display across multiple monitors, like running multiple monitors in Windows and extending your desktop... all they'll do is send the same thing to both.