NVR Setup 11 - Maintenance Menu

In this episode of In the Trenches, SCW’s expert discusses the NVR Maintenance menu.

Our speaker today is:

Andrew

Andrew:

Under our NVR maintenance menu. First option we're going to land on here is called log on the right side. This is going to be a diagnostic tool that lists any of the system features and triggers that have happened in real time. So we can search, we can select a particular day or time or a span and tell it what type of alarm event we're looking for. For each one you select on the left, there's a breakout of those particular options on the right, so we can see if a line was crossed, it'll give us just those events and when that happened, or if there was an illegal login, we could check that or video loss. We set the duration we're looking for and we can search. We also get options to export this, so this can be very helpful for diagnostic HDD, we're going to have options to do some minor testing and bad sector testing on a hard disc.

If that's in question, typically you won't need to get into this unless you're having some kind of ongoing issue with your hard drive. You can run a smart test on it. It'll give us the outcome, tell us if the disc is healthy and then we can replace it if needed. Online user. This is just going to show who's currently logged into our system, how long they've been logged in. This is a good way to diagnose. If we're having many, many users and we're using a lot of streams, we could see them here. Network info, we're going to get some network diagnostic tools here. It's going to tell us if we're online, give us a graph of our connection speeds.

If you have more than one NIC card, it'll list secondaries there as well. So get some net detection options, just some basic feedback from our network connection, and this is a very helpful one for our direct and connected cameras. Under network info, POE Port status, we get an option to see any of our connected cameras and if they're receiving power and if they're linked. This can also be very helpful for troubleshooting. Network Statistics is just going to show us our incoming and outgoing bandwidth and remote playback camera. This is going to show us the current ongoing state of the camera in real time. So if you load this screen, it's going to show us what every particular camera was doing when you loaded the screen. So it may say recording, not recording on and off. You'll see some things happening here as it goes on. If you've got any tamper events happening, you can get some real time feedback on that recording. Kind of a similar screen. It's going to tell us if things have been triggered on a particular camera. For instance, this camera's got a normal ongoing 24 hour recording. It tells us the frame rate and what resolution the camera's running at, so we can see every camera in our list. Once it say no recording may just not have been triggered up to that point.

Maintenance. This is going to be where we're able to restart our NVR default. The NVR factory default.

If can export our configuration file, which is going to contain all of our system information in case we need to load it into another unit. We can import configuration. Similarly, client log, we're not going to use that. We're going to skip over. We've got another option to auto restart system. So you could set that to be every day or only on a certain day of the week, and we can remove some files from the log after a period of time. Here. Diagnosis info. We're able to get some export on the logs and info that has happened on the system. We got options for local upgrade. This is if we've been provided a firmware file or we need to load it manually because of internet connection issues. We can do that. We can also do the same for IP camera Cloud upgrade. This is going to be where we're able to check our NVR for updates and our IP cameras.

So as long as that PTP option previously was enabled, we're going to be able to click check for update. It's going to call out to the server and find out if we're on the latest version for this NVR. If we need to, and it shows that there's a later version. You click upgrade again and that'll restart the NVR Inversely. We've got an IPC, which stands for IP camera. This is going to be our option to check any of the cameras in the system for updates. So in this situation, I'm just going to select all cameras and check for update on the latest version for this. But if you have an update available, you'll get a blue Cloud in this cloud upgrade column. If you have multiple, since we're all still selected, we're just going to click batch upgrade. That'll run through an update. All selected cameras with updates available, they typically run two to three at a time.

They'll shut off and then after about 60 seconds, they'll return to the live view screen. One, click collect. This can be useful diagnosis info, but we probably won't be getting into it too much. So really just a diagnostic tool. And then the last option here is backup. This is going to be our option to back up to an external device for large amounts of data. So if we need an entire day, if we need three to four days, we're able to kind of bulk export the needed clips all at one time. We're not going to be able to watch any of that as it's happening. It's just going to export it all. So we're not going to be able to view the video. It's good for archiving and backing up on a regular basis, and that's when we would typically use it.