Problems with TEMPEST DVR

[CGDiCCTV 0]

Last July, I installed 20 Tempest DVR's (mostly 9000 series a few 8000) for two of my best customers. In February, 3 of them locked up and would not reboot. I bought 3 new ones to replace the bad ones and immediately had problems with two of the new ones locking up. Since then I've had problems with 6 more units locking up. Up until last week, I'd only had problems with the 9000 series, but now the 8000's are starting to do the same thing.

I've spent over 30 hours on the phone with Tempest tech support to no avail. They suggest reinstalling the software, which erases the video and does not fix the problem.

Is anybody else having problems with these units? Does anybody have any possible solutions?

[Khandurian 0]

Is it a complete hard lock? what I would suggest is starting with the actuall hardware first...

 

since you probably have one of the machines in your possession... format the hdd... do NOT install the dvr software for the card... get all the drivers installed, and update the os with all the patches....

 

While your doing this, take note to see if you get a lockup during these processes.... if you do, then you might want to look at the memmory, or possible heat problems.

 

Make sure the computer is pulling in and blowing out air in the proper places.

If it is, open up the case while after it's been running for awhile and carfully touch the heatsink... if it BURNS, then the fan on the heatsink isnt working properly...

 

If the cpu is warm to the touch, turn it off, replace the memmory...

[JMANOFNVS 0]

I always wondered how they could sell PC DVRs so cheap. I would guess they are using cheap PC components that are not designed for 24/7 surveillance applications. If they are burning up then thats probably the issue. They are sending advanced replacments right??

[Khandurian 0]

I always wondered how they could sell PC DVRs so cheap. I would guess they are using cheap PC components that are not designed for 24/7 surveillance applications. If they are burning up then thats probably the issue. They are sending advanced replacments right??

 

Well, you can build your own pc for relativly (sp?) cheap. The worst problem is going cheap on the cpu fan. Which in turn, causes over heating problems.

[CGDiCCTV 0]

I've tried replacing the motherboard, power supply, video output card, and hard drives. As well as, adding case fans. So far nothing has helped.

 

We haven't bothered with advance replacements for two reasons:

1) We purchased three new units (as i mentioned in my original post) and two were bad out of the box.

2) Tempest has been extremely difficult to deal with. I tried to explain to them that our customers are required by law to keep six months video history so I needed to keep the hard drives out of the bad units for six months. They charged me $155 for each 250 gig hard drive. I've had numerous other problems with Tempest, but there is not enough space here for me to relate all of them.

 

As far as, loading the OS and drivers separately, this is a linux based unit and the OS is inseparable from the Tempest software. I've had several computer experts look at it and they can't find a way to separate them.

 

I believe the problem may be in the proprietary Tempest capture cards.

Each card has one BT878 capture chip which should capture 30 frames per second, yet Tempest claims a capture rate of 60 frames per second per card. I've set the capture rate at 5 frames per second yet on playback the capture rate seems closer to 10 frames per second. It seems the BT878 is being overclocked. There is an option in the software that is suppose to disable this feature but it does not seem to work. There is a relatively large IC on the capture card that I beleive modifies the function of the BT878.

[Thomas 0]

Change experts. Unless they wrote their app to be a binary driver...it's not intermingled with the kernal code. Most likely you have some kids who know windows, couldn't figure out what a linux file system looks like and decleared it to be one thing.

[Khandurian 0]

Well, youve changed out everything according to your post. From what I saw you posted, you changed out quite a bit.

 

When you changed out the motherboards, did you also change out the CPU and/or the memmory? You still could be possibly facing an overheat problem due to the heatsink attached to the cpu is not completly getting rid of all the heat.

 

As I said, before, you can STILL do an OS install. Take those drives out that you have, set them aside so that they do not get touched. Install a new hdd. Remove the tempest card (can it be removed? or did they put a tamper seal across the board?) and load up what ever flavor of linux it's running. This will tell you alot. You dont have to install the drivers for the card until your ready to install the card.

 

Have you noticed what flavor of Linux it's running? Redhat? Slackware? Fedora? Debian? (I could go on and on here!) Im sorry I dont have any experience with the Tempest card and drivers. However, I do have extensive knowledge in PC's.

 

Anyways, what you can do, is after the machine has been running for an hour, open the cover, and physically touch the heatsink on the cpu. If the heatsink and fan are doing their job, it should be warm/boderline mild hot. If it burns you, then you definatly know thats your problem.

 

You may want to consider also looking into memmory fans as well. Let us know.

[CGDiCCTV 0]

Sorry its taken me so long to get back on this topic but I had to give myself a crash course in Linux. So here is what I found.

No overheating on any component. I mounted the master hard drive on another Linux system and went through the logs. In /var/log/maillog I found several hundred entries regarding errors in the sendmail daemon. The errors occurred just prior to lock up. Could this be the cause of the problem or just a symptom? I went ahead and disabled the daemon on my most problematic unit. So far no lock up.