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uPnP in a DVR? Whats the advantage there??

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Ok.. at home I'm a q-see QT428 which is made by TVT - I think its a 2308se if I remember correctly... anyway - we had some lightning the other night and the DVR just kept resetting it self about 30 seconds after we got video. In a keep your fingers crossed moment, I upgraded the firmware to whatever the latest was (3.1.81p I think) which added uPnP and IE9 support (plus the last firmware added full mac-os safari support so I needed the update anyway)... well that solved the issue and now its working again the way it should... but it added upnp and I'm clueless.

 

Now on to my question: What does having uPnP on a dvr do exactly? I should probably know but I'm not up to date on all the cool stuff like DLNA? uPnP? and alike... so what gives??????????

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play

One solution for NAT traversal, called the Internet Gateway Device Protocol (IGD Protocol), is implemented via UPnP. Many routers and firewalls expose themselves as Internet Gateway Devices, allowing any local UPnP control point to perform a variety of actions, including retrieving the external IP address of the device, enumerate existing port mappings, and add or remove port mappings. By adding a port mapping, a UPnP controller behind the IGD can enable traversal of the IGD from an external address to an internal client.

 

In short: if your router supports it, UPnP should let your DVR set up its own port forwarding.

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In the case of a DVR, there's probably not much other benefit to it. The article I linked lists numerous different things UPnP is designed for, but most of them wouldn't apply to a DVR. And again, for the port mapping to work, the DVR would have to support that feature of UPnP as well.

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I just know Ive always disabled it on Windows ...

 

"..with the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) system in its default "enabled" state, any of the many millions of Internet-connected UPnP-equipped Windows systems could be remotely commandeered and forced to download and run any malicious code of a hacker's design. This includes using the machine to launch potent Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

 

This means that extremely damaging CodeRed and Nimda-style worms can now be written for millions of Windows machines. Whereas the Microsoft IIS server worms of 2001 found and infested 'only' several hundred thousand IIS servers, a Windows "Universal Plug and Play" worm would have more than ten million XP systems, in addition to many more Windows 98/ME systems, upon which to prey today."

 

http://www.grc.com/UnPnP/UnPnP.htm

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I know, just saying.

Also it seems to be used for CMS software to search the local network for its devices.

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No advantage to it at all, at least for our purposes. I always turn it off as it creates extra unwanted net traffic while pinging for other devices. Not that it is eating a great amount of bandwidth, just another pain in the ass when reviewing logs.

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Well, this may be off topic, but I'm going to post this part of it here since it was mentioned in this thread.

 

My brother bought one of these QT428 8ch D1 dvr's with 8 cameras, and we finally set it up the other day before the weather got too hot here in Texas. Well, I updated his firmware to the latest before we started - with this firmware the qt428 has upnp, and his router is a linksys cisco e1000 which is upnp, and it didnt set it self up - in fact, it was much harder to set up because his isp (cable modem) must block port 80 on its own, and possibly the data port the dvr wanted to use (6030 I think) and while I was able to set it up for LAN viewing, I couldn't get it to remote access over ddns setup... Remember, I've set up 4 of these so far, and never had a problem with setting up port forwarding on the routers and getting remote access before... I had to change the ports in the config to something way up there to make it work. And I'm sad to say it took me about an hour to finally figure it out.

 

Once I changed the http and data port from 80 and 6030, it all worked fine first try.

 

Now that I got my brother hooked on cctv system, I'll have to get one for my mom's house too...

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