ok now i have ventured into new territory and am lost i have a customer with a 9 channel dvr at the office i need to know how to give him the abbility to view his cameras from home he has high speed cable at office but i need to know how even if i give it an ip address can he view it i dont quite understand all of this there is no static ip at the office and everything is set to dhcp so any help would be appreciated in this matter

 

A lot depends on how he plans (or normally does already) to connect to his office network from external. If they are using some form of VPN, it may be as simple as running the software on the computer he normally runs on. The viewer software for the DVR may have some clues in the help files. I do know that setting the ip addresses on some DVRs is done using a direct serial cable connection.

 

as of right now he does not connect to anything at the office from off site but is that what i am going to have to do is run some sort of vpn software on a computer on the network and give him access to it with the software on that computer for him to be able to get in to it

 

The easist thing to do is to toss a linksys or smc router that has support for a dynamic IP/DNS sollution. I use a linksys router for this currently. Basically it connects to a service and updates them with the IP it gets via dhcp from the cable provider. There are several out there (many of them free). TZO.com is one that I can think of off the top of my head and I see that they have a DVR scenario listed under their "solutions" links.

Once this is up then you will either need to setup the router to do the forwarding to the DVR ip address (so that requests sent to the router are redirected to the DVR to fulfill).

If you don't want to do the port forwarding then you will need to setup VPN so that the customer can connect to the office network from home as if he were physically connected to it locally.

 

ok you definately sound like you could help me and i have a usrobotics router there now so if there is any way could you go step by step on what i need to do you can email me at <Email address deleted by Moderator>


"...email addresses in signatures or posting of any kind are not allowed."

 

FYI, posting your email addy is frowned upon. Also If I answer off-line then the next person can't find the answer in the archive when searching. I can help you here if you don't mind.

 

You need a router that has DDNS support. Then configure it per the instructions manual. For instance ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pdf/wrt54gv1.1_ug.pdf (page 27)

You'll need to make an account with the service that you intend to use. That should be pretty self explanitory but dependant upon which service you use which in turn depends on which ones are supported by the router you use.

Once that is done you just need to know which ports are used to view the DVR and also give it a static IP address. I'll assume that it has a built in web server so that would be port 80.

Then in the case of the linksys (using the same PDF above - page 38) you set up the forwarding so that requests coming to the router get forwarded to the IP address assigned to the DVR.

That pretty much is it.