Setup Internet Connection to Digital Video Recorder Behind Router

This is first article from two part series looking at the seemingly easy task of setting up Internet connection to security DVR. While this article will focus on general steps involved in proper connection forwarding to CCTV DVR, the part two is all about dynamic DNS support and workarounds. Before we step into the main subject, I like to explain very briefly a few key aspects of Internet connection for those of us not familiar with term like IP address, DDNS, port forwarding or IP mapping.

Terminology:

Every computer or other network device, in our case CCTV recorder has its own address called IP address, much like your home address it allows the information to find its way in enormous world of internet. IP address has four groups of numbers separated by dots; the number range is between 0 and 255. There are two separate networks that we need to take into consideration, LAN for Local Area Network and WAN for Wide Area Network. LAN has its own IP addresses and handles connection on local network devices (computers or devices located in your home or office network), if WAN IP is your home address than LAN IP would be your apartment number.

WAN IP is an external address visible to every user on the Internet. We will explain rest of the terminology as we go along.

Setup:

The best way to explain and clarify surveillance DVR connection setup is to use an example. In our example, we will setup DVR model VDV-074 from DVRExperts thru Netopia Router/Modem combo currently used by AT&T DSL provider with static IP service, I will also use Linksys WRT54G Router for Cable DSL connection. Security DVR recorder needs to be connected to the Internet through Router and Modem, in some cases Router and Modem are all in one devices, for example Netopia Routers.

For standalone Modems please connect the Internet out to WAN port, on your Router. Connect CCTV DVR and computers to available ports on the Router as well. Your Router will need to be setup now to log in to the Internet service provider and establish connection.

Netopia Router users:

Open up browser on your computer and type into the address bar your routers default IP http://

192.168.1.254. User name and password window should appear; the default user name and password for Netopia Routers are admin for user and serial number of your Router for the password.

Select Configure followed by Quick start link, type your Internet service providers user name (email address) and your ISP password. Click submit and alert icon located in upper right corner (I know it is strange), finally select save and restart. Your connection should be up in minute or so, click home link to see your connection status.

Linksys Router users:

Open up browser on your computer and type into the address bar your routers default IP [http://192.168.1.1]. User name and password window should appear; the default user name and password for Linksys routers are admin for user and admin for the password.

The home page of the router has ISP settings, type in your email address as a user name and ISP password for the password, select save or submit. The Router will restart after minute or so, log in again and go to status page to see if your connection status is UP.

If everything is ok and your connection is UP, we can now proceed to fun part of the setup process

There is great number of different security Digital Video Recorders on the market, so please follow your DVR's manual for details; I will only provide the proper settings. In the DVR menu, setup static LAN (Internal) IP for the DVR, in our example we have 3 computers and DVR. Each device has assigned LAN IP address as follows:

Computer 1 - 192.168.1.100

Computer 2 - 192.168.1.101

Computer 3 - 192.168.1.102

DVR - 192.168.1.103

The surveillance DVR will now be accessible within our network by typing its assigned internal IP (192.168.1.103) into browser or connection software. What we need now is to forward the connection from external IP (WAN) which is accessible from outside of our network to the LAN IP of the DVR (192.168.1.103).

Netopia Router users:

Select Configure followed by Advanced and finally IP Maps. IP map table should be empty, click on add and type into IP Map Entry Name text box the name of your DVR connection, in our example I just typed in DVR so I know what this IP map is for. In Internal IP address box type in 192.168.1.103, for external IP address refer to you ISP work sheet and find out what is your IP. In some cases ISP will provide more than one static IP, you can choose one of them.

Click submit and alert icon located in upper right corner, finally select save and restart.

From now on anyone requesting external IP will be forwarded to the internal IP of the DVR (192.168.1.103), therefore the connection should be established successfully.

Linksys Router users:

When setting up your DVR for access from the Internet, you will need to configure Port Forwarding on your Linksys Router. This can be accomplished in one of two ways, Specific Port Forwarding or the DMZ host. The DMZ host automatically forwards all incoming connection requests to a given IP address on your local network. Open the Applications & Gaming section of the router and choose DMZ. DMZ is not secure and should only be used with embedded, non-PC based CCTV recorders.

To expose the DVR to the Internet, enter the DVR local IP address (192.168.1.103) in the DMZ Host IP address box. In some cases you may just want to forward specific ports to your security DVR. If you are running any other device/server that hosts services available to the internet, you will want to use specific port forwarding instead of the DMZ Host, also if your DVR is PC based it is strongly recommended for security reasons, to only forward ports used by DVR connection. Open the applications & Gaming section of the router and choose Port Range Forwarding. Type in the name for the connection, starting port number, ending port number and internal IP of the DVR (192.168.1.103 in our example). Save and exit.

Your connection is now setup properly.

You probably noticed the term static IP in this article, and are wondering what that is.

Well, static IP is what the name suggests an IP that never changes. While there is no problem with internal IP selection; we can use whatever we want or prefer - the external IP, usually is dynamic. The static IP has to be requested from the ISP and is more expensive than dynamic IP. In our case we do want static IP so we have address for CCTV DVR connection that will never change.

Throughout this tutorial I have assumed that the external static IP is available.

Unfortunately in many areas it is not, or the cost is prohibitive. Don't panic yet, there is at least couple of different ways around this problem and I will try to go over each approach in my next article "How to use free dynamic DNS services for DVR connection."

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Tweaking DNS Setting - A Way to Speed Up Internet Connection

Mostly people expect a fast response when they browse the internet, but it doesn't always run as mostly people expect. Typically there are many factors that contribute a slow internet connection such as: a bad line from the customer premises to the nearest central office of the service provider, Central office problems, buggy software, and mostly due to the Web farm servers you browse to at the other end of the connection. So how do you speed up internet connection?

Generally when you sign-up the internet connection, there should be such kind of a service level agreement at least we know the bandwidth rate they provide the services to the subscriber. If you use traditional dial-up connection the maximum bandwidth will be 56Kbps. You cannot speed up internet connection exceeding the

architecture limitation. DOCSIS 3.0 Cable architecture probably can provide you faster speed up to 300 Mbps - but depends on the infrastructure the ISPs have built.

Definitely it is beyond our control when the bottom lines of the problems come from the ISP, the central office equipment, and slow web servers. But basically you can tweak the computers to get them in high performance in browsing the internet. The following guidelines will help you manipulate the computers to speed up internet connection.

How to tweak DNS setting to speed up internet connection

When you type in the hostnames in the browser such as cisco.com, the DNS resolver needs to translate it into the corresponding IP address such as 55.125.102.113. DNS servers provide that name resolution automatically and behind the scenes as you surf the Web.

Editing Host File

A very simple way to speed up internet connection regarding the DNS setting is by editing the computer local hosts file. It takes time to send your request to a DNS server, have the server look up the proper IP address to resolve the name, and then send the IP address back to your PC. You can eliminate that delay by creating or

editing a local HOSTS file on your own PC that contains hostnames and their corresponding IP addresses.

Windows will first lookup the entry in the HOSTS file to see if there's an entry for the hostname, and, if it finds it, it will resolve the address itself. That way, you won't have to go out to a DNS server and wait for the response before visiting a web site. You can edit the HOSTS file with the notepad editor and you can create lists of most frequent web sites you visit.

You'll find an existing HOSTS file in C:\System32\Drivers\Etc\HOSTS. Open it in Notepad and enter the IP addresses and hostnames of your commonly visited web sites with the following format:

65.301.110.37 sysneta.com #example of the entry

67.101.200.107 computer-network.net

Each entry in the file should be on one line. The IP address should be in the first column and the corresponding hostname in the next column. At least one space should separate the two columns. You can add comments to the file by preceding the line with a hash (#),

Adjust the Computer DNS Caching Settings

You can also adjust the DNS Caching setting to help speed up internet connection. When you visit a site, Windows puts the DNS information into a local DNS cache on the computers. When you browse a website, your Computer first looks in its local DNS cache, called the resolve cache, to see whether the DNS information

is already in there. If it finds the information locally, it doesn't have to query a remote DNS server to find IP information. The cache is made up of recently queried names and entries taken from your HOSTS file.The cache contains both negative and positive entries that we can hack to help speed up internet connection.

Positive entries are those in which the DNS lookup succeeded, and you were able to connect to the web site. When XP looks in the cache, if it finds a positive entry, it immediately uses that DNS information and sends you to the requested web site.

Negative entries are those in which no match was found, and you end up getting a "Cannot find server or DNS Error" in your browser. Similarly, when the computer looks in the cache and finds a negative entry, it gives you the error message without bothering to go out to the site.

Negative entries can lead to problems. When you try to make a connection to a site that has a negative entry in your cache, you'll get an error message, even if the site's problems have been resolved and it's now reachable.You can solve this problem to speed up internet connection using a Registry hack. By default, XP caches

negative entries for five minutes. After five minutes, they're cleared from your cache. But if you'd like, you can force XP not to cache these negative entries, so that you'll never run into this problem.

Edit the registry using registry editor (Regedit from the Run command) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters.

Create a new DWORD value with the name NegativeCacheTime and give it a value of 0. (The value may already exist. If it does, edit its value to 0.) The DWORD determines how much time, in seconds, to keep negative entries in the DNS cache. If you like, you can have the entries stay alive for one second by giving it a value of 1. After you're done editing, exit the Registry. To make the change take effect, restart your computer, or flush your cache by issuing the command ipconfig /flushdns at a command prompt.That command will flush your DNS cache - all the entries, both positive and negative, will be flushed, and it will be empty until you start visiting web sites. Negative entries, however, will not be added to the cache if you've given the DWORD a value of 0.

To help you speed up internet connection you can also reduce the Web Cache as small as possible. The less disk space in your computer Web Cache for internet temporary files is less data the computer needs to search through. How to do that?

From your Windows, do the following:

Click Start => Select Control Panel => double click Internet Options => and then click Settings under Browsing History. Reduce the Disk Space to Use to the minimum amount the system recommend or as low as you want. Clear Internet Temporary Files

Another good way to speed up internet connection is to clear your internet temporary files. Many files in the web cache are active such as cookies are loaded in the browsers and constantly update themselves when you are surfing the internet. The computers always search the temporary files to match the latest version of a web page. To speed up internet connection you can clear the web cache to cut down the works the computer needs to do. The following steps can be tried to delete the web cache, make sure to shutdown the browsers prior performing the steps.

Click Start => Click Control Panel => double click Internet Options => Click Delete Files under Temporary Internet Files on the General tab. => check the Delete all offline content box and then click OK.

Spyware and viruses

Spyware and any types of Internet threats can cause the computers to slow down the internet response. Some Trojan viruses can also causes slow internet connection; scan the virus regularly to help you speed up internet connection. Make sure the computers are well protected by the antivirus software.

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How to Troubleshoot Your Internet Connection for DSL or Cable Service

One of the common problems among internet users is testing their
internet connection to pinpoint the exact problem. There is a big number of internet users who use DSL, and cable modem service.

You set us your connection the way your ISP (internet service provider)instruct you to. Sometimes, it doesn't work for numerous reasons.

You service is not ready, your hardware in not connected properly, or your ISP is having problems.

Whatever the cause of the problem maybe, there are some diagnostic tools you can use in Windows XP, in order to identify the problem.

If you are not exact in your diagnostic, you will get a good idea at least.

Before we get to the diagnostic tools, let us discuss what is involved in an internet connection.

The information travels over the internet to your computer through your ISP service. This is done through a High speed modem then to a network card installed in your computer.

Your computer is called a host, your service provider will give
you the DNS IP address, and you get your login and password. That is all what you have from your ISP.

Sometimes, your internet connection fails, and you want to find
out the problem. You may be able to fix it, or at least get some
information about the problem to advise your isp for help.

You will start by accessing the command prompt by going in sequence to:

Start menu, program, accessories, then command prompt. A window
will open where you type commands from the prompt.

At the command prompt, you type: IPCONFIG. This command will give you the active network connection on your computer. Here is an example:

PPP adapter Copy :

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 68.239.158.45

Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255

Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 68.239.158.45

The above output was produced when I ran the Ipconfig command on my own computer running Window XP OS, and A DSL connection. The IP address is my computer address assigned by the ISP.

Please note, you can add an option to this command, in order to get more detailed information about your connection. Here is the output, when I ran the same command with the
"all" option.

Ipconfig /ALL

PPP adapter Copy :

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Description . . . . . . . . . . . : WAN (PPP/SLIP) Interface

Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-53-45-00-00-00

Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No

IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 68.239.158.45

Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255

Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 68.239.158.45

DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 151.198.0.39
151.197.0.39
NetBIOS over TCP/IP. . . . . . . . : Disabled

Notice now, the output includes the phisycal address of the network interface card installed in my computer. Also, you see the DNS IP addresses. With the above information, I didn't have any problems.

Supposed ,I disconnect my DSL connection and ran the command again, this is the new result:

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1

Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0

Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Notice in this case, where I disconnected my connection, you don't get a DNS server. This tells you that I am not connected to the internet.

Also, notice the IP address starts with 192.168, which is the default address whenever your computer is not connected to the internet.

Another command is the ping command. It will allow to check if a computer is connected to the network and ready to communicate, whether intranet,
or internet.

Once you run it,it will sent a packet to the computer specified and gives the time it took for the packet to travel. This is an a output when I tried to ping [http://www.yahoo.com:]

C:>ping [http://www.yahoo.com]

Pinging www.yahoo.akadns.net [216.109.118.66] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.109.118.66: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=55

Reply from 216.109.118.66: bytes=32 time=39ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 216.109.118.66:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 35ms, Maximum = 39ms, Average = 38ms.

That shows that the host was reachable, and connected to the internet.

A very important command is the Nslookup. This will let you check if DNS (domain name server) is working properly. The function of the DNS server is to translate ip addresses to domain name of the networked computer. Here is an example:

C:> nslookup [http://www.yahoo.com]

Server: home5.bellatlantic.net

Address: 151.198.0.39

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: [http://www.yahoo.akadns.net]

Addresses: 216.109.118.67

Aliases: [http://www.yahoo.com]

So, you enter the name after Nslookup, it will give you IP addresses and vice versa.

In summary, there more commands in Windows Xp, but using the three above commands should give you a good idea about your internet connection problems. You can find where the problem is occurring. Is it your machine, or the ISP.

Thanks,

George Chamoun

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