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[cmontyburns]

I'm wondering if the cameras might have a problem coming online if they "wake up" before the router and wifi are back up.  If they don't see the wifi and network connection in the first couple of minutes after the power comes on do they give up?    Anyone have any similar observations?

Every so often, I'll have to unplug a camera and plug it back in to get it to reconnect after a power blip.  But that's definitely the exception, not the rule.  So I would say generally no, although it's possible I have a much faster WAP than you do. 

[remoteCamsFarAway]

On site now at my cameras.  Adjusted my configuration to give everyone static IP addresses.  Briefly to recap......these cameras are in the Caribbean about 2000  miles from my home in Colorado.  The site there is not manned so I don't really have anyone I can frequently send over to reset cameras.  The internet connection is 1Mb/s and the connection sometimes drops out completely.  Sometimes there are power outages.  My DSL modem/router is a SmartRG SR350N (wireless disabled) followed by a Netgear R6400 router/WAP.  My 2330L has entered an offline state multiple times. For a few, at least, I was able to have someone come over and power cycle it.  While the SmartRG and 2330L boot up quickly the Netgear takes multiple minutes to come online.

EXPERIMENT: SIMULATE A POWER OUTAGE

1) Turn off all equipment.
2) Turn on all equipment simultaneously.
3) RESULTS: 2330L only occasionally comes online but generally not.

EXPERIMENT: EXAGERATE THE TIME BETWEEN CAMERA COMING UP AND POWERING ROUTER
1) Power off all equipment
2) Power up the 2330L and wait a minute or two
3) Power up SmartRG and Netgear
4) In a sample of about 4 tries, 2330L NEVER came online.

EXPERIMENT: ENABLE THE DAILY REBOOT OPTION IN THE 2330L
1) While online set daily reboot option in 2330L to about 15 minutes from now.
2) Power off all equipment and wait a minute.
3) Power on 2330L and wait a minute.
4) Power on SmartRG and Netgear.
5) When Netgear finally comes online, confirm 2330L still is not there.
6) Periodically confirm that the 2330L is still not available on the local network.
7) Shortly after the scheduled reboot time check to see that the 2330L is back online. IN MY SMALL SAMPLE OF 4 TRIES THIS WORKED EVERY TIME!

Moral of the story (BE SURE TO READ UPDATE IN NEXT PARAGRAPH) : For remote operations I'd strongly advise enabling the auto-reboot feature on a daily basis!  I had bought some Dlink remote power switches thinking I would risk (because they may have the same problem) remotely power cycling the cameras using these but I think the reboot option appears to be a better (and less expensive) choice.

UPDATE AUG 7, 2016 : I'VE CHANGED THE MORAL:  With additional experience with rebooting, I've found that if the camera gets lost as the result of the auto-reboot it might not come back.  I was able to correlate losing one 2330L cam to exactly the time it rebooted because that cam was tied into my DNR-312L recorder.  The timestamp where it went offline was right at reboot time.  I also lost two other 2330L cams that were on reboot schedules.  After two weeks I had my caretaker come over and power-cycle them.  I NOW DO NOT RECOMMEND USING AUTO-REBOOT.  However, my router/access point is now on a UPS and I've now confirmed that I've recovered all five (3x2330L and 2x2630L) after at least two power outages.  NOW I RECOMMEND HAVING AN UPS ON THE IT EQUIPMENT THAT THE WIFI CAMS CONNECT TO.

Will be here for another week.  Will keep an eye on this and add any relevant notes.  Haven't checked to see if this fixes the same problem with my two 2630L cameras.  Will update that post in the 2630L category once I've done that.

Hope this note helps some struggling soul out there!

FURRYNUTZ : If you have a contact at Dlink you might have them look at my notes above.  This might clue them in about ways they could improve the robustness of their training sequence.

[FurryNutz]

Maybe your experiment ENABLE THE DAILY REBOOT OPTION IN THE 2330L needs to be put in to use. The use of a digital power timer with the 2330L could help on this.

[RYAT3]

Which 2330l f/w?

[remoteCamsFarAway]

Maybe your experiment ENABLE THE DAILY REBOOT OPTION IN THE 2330L needs to be put in to use. The use of a digital power timer with the 2330L could help on this.

Furrynutz..... Not sure what you meant here.......The seeming solution (which is really a workaround for what I believe to be a bug) to my problem is to enable that option that is already in the MAINTENANCE --> SYSTEM webpage menu.

 FOR RYAT3......firmware is 1.12.

[FurryNutz]

Ok, I missed that. If there is a reboot feature in the cameras maintenance menu, I'd enable it and configure it and see how it does.

[remoteCamsFarAway]

Update:  Back from the islands.  I'd say camera behavior is pretty much confirmed now.  We had a couple of ACTUAL (not experimental) power outages while there.  I had the 2330L cameras set to boot at 10AM.  First power outage was in afternoon and came on about 4PM.  Remember the R6400 router/AP takes at least two minutes or more to come online following a power cycle.  Did not see the cameras at all after power came back.  I checked at about 10PM (6 hours after power was restored) and they were still not there.  In the morning when I woke up they were all there!  I'm guessing that the 2330Ls booted when the power came back on and, in their very short attention spans, did not see the router and immediately gave up.  I'm assuming they have no battery backup for the real-time-clock so they probably initialize to midnight when power is restored.  Since my reboot time was set for 10AM I'm guessing the cameras all rebooted about 10 hours after power was restored (while I was snoozing), found the LAN which had been back for about 10 hours, got synchronized to network time, and were then back online.

Based on this experience I've changed my arbitrary reboot time to 00:10 instead of 10:00 so that it will not take 10 hours to recover.

SECOND EXPERIENCE:  Between the first actual power outage and the next I put my router/AP on a UPS system which holds it up for hours.  We had a second actual power outage that lasted a couple of hours.  The UPS held up the router for the entire time and the cameras came back online immediately.  This was before I changed the reboot time to 10 minutes past midnight so the recovery was not due to the cameras new reboot schedule.  Thus, as expected, the cameras connected immediately since the router was online when camera power was restored.

THIRD EXPERIENCE:
I've now been through about a week after leaving.  Currently missing two out of three 2330L cameras that were there yesterday.  Looks like the autoreboot is not absolute after all.  Yes, the autoreboot seems to bring offline cameras back online but it also seems like it sometimes loses cameras on the reboot.  This is not good.  I'm expecting (hoping) that the two missing cameras will come back online when they reboot tonight.  I'm now wondering if I should have implemented the remote control outlets after all.  Remember that I was concerned they would suffer the same disease as these cameras in that they might not always stay online.  Oh well, next visit is in November.  Will need to wait until then to set up new experiment.

THIRD EXPERIENCE FOLLOWUP:
It's been several days now where the two missing cameras should have been rebooting every 24 hours and coming back online but they have not re-emerged.  I don't know why they seemed to recover so well while I was on-site and, of course, they don't return now that I'm operating remotely.  They are not reconnecting to the router like they did during the experimental period.  While there I had assigned them static IP addresses per earlier recommendations.  After I was back here I had read a posting that cameras might not reconnect if the access point changes the wifi channel.  Makes sense given the connectivity problems these cameras have.  I forgot to change the access point setting to lock the wifi channel down to a single channel.  It is on AUTO mode.  I wonder if that's what happened.  Afraid to change that setting remotely since I could knock out the remaining 3 cameras (two 2630L and one 2330L) that are online.  Looks like my only recovery opportunity now is for a real power outage to do a power-on reset to the cameras.  Remember that I now have UPS on the router so it will be online while the cameras will all get the power reset.

LESSONS LEARNED:
1) Auto-reboot can recover a camera that is not linked up.
2) Auto-reboot can also take an online camera offline for some reason.  Not sure why it's going offline sometimes.  Signal to cameras are reasonably strong and there is little RF interference in this area.
3) Having the router on the UPS so that the wifi signal is already there when the cameras power on after a power outage seems to resolve power outage issues.
4) Need to reconsider the use of remote power outlets to allow me to cycle power on lost cameras.
5) Should configure all camera components with static IP addresses and set access point wifi channel for fixed (NOT AUTO) channel selection.

UPDATE AUG 7, 2016 : With additional experience with rebooting, I've found that if the camera gets lost as the result of the auto-reboot it might not come back.  I was able to correlate losing one 2330L cam to exactly the time it rebooted because that cam was tied into my DNR-312L recorder.  The timestamp where it went offline was right at reboot time.  I also lost two other 2330L cams that were on reboot schedules.  After two weeks I had my caretaker come over and power-cycle them.  I NOW DO NOT RECOMMEND USING AUTO-REBOOT.  However, my router/access point is now on a UPS and I've now confirmed that I've recovered all five (3x2330L and 2x2630L) after at least two power outages.  NOW I RECOMMEND HAVING AN UPS ON THE IT EQUIPMENT THAT THE WIFI CAMS CONNECT TO.

[remoteCamsFarAway]

Just lost my third and last remaining 2330L camera.  The first two disappeared a few days after leaving the remote site.  This is really starting to (politely) bum me out.  When compared to all of the above experiments this is different:

• Checking the event logs from the two remaining 2630L cameras there was no power outage. 
  
• This camera is located about 8 feet from the access point with a signal strength previously reported by the camera in the 90s. 
  
• myDlink reported the camera going offline about 5 hours after the camera's scheduled reboot time so it doesn't appear to have gone offline as the result of a reboot.
  

ONE THING THAT DID CATCH MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY is that I was looking through the log of this last camera (before it went offline) and I noticed that it had been rebooting once or twice a day at times other than the scheduled reboot just after midnight.  There was no similar log activity in the two 2630L cams which are on the same power source.  WHAT'S THAT ABOUT?

The only activity even remotely related to recent system configuration changes that could affect that camera is that yesterday I removed the two missing 2330L cameras and also this one (even though it was working) from the list of cameras accessed by the DNR-312L recorder.  However, the camera was still online after I did that.  I removed this camera because I could see that the 312L was continuously pulling streams from all of the cameras and I was wondering if this could be what was knocking out the 2330L cams.  This cam coincidently (and so far I think it's just a coincidence) disappeared about 10 hours after I made that change.

The only other excuse I can think of for the camera going offline is that, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, I forgot to change the router to lock down the wireless channel.  Someone else's posting said that the AUTO wireless channel in the access point was knocking out their cameras.  Will need to have caretaker come in and power cycle the three 2330L cameras.

The two 2630L cams are hanging in there.

[RYAT3]

I remember you couldn't wire the cams between floors,  but it sounds like you set up access points on the same floor that probably go back to the main router?

Can you wire the cams to the access point?

[remoteCamsFarAway]

TO RYAT3 : No cams are currently wired to an AP or router.  Everything is wifi except the DNR-312L recorder which is wired.  However, I'm planning on rearranging some of the IT equipment to take advantage of some existing cable TV holes in the house and directly connect some of the cams.  My two indoor cams are 2630L.  They don't have an ethernet connection, only wifi.  One of these is the one through the concrete floor.

Currently I'm using the Netgear R6400 as an access point and it is located on one end of the upstairs floor.  I've got a 5GHZ link to a Netgear EX6200 wifi extender on the other end of the upper floor.  The distance between the extender upstairs and the 2330L outside is about 14 feet.  The distance between the extender upstairs and the 2630L downstairs through the concrete floor is about 8 feet (2.4GHz wifi).  Both are near windows so that seems to work.

That said, I'm going to be replacing the outside 2330L with a camera that has better resolution and also better IR illumination for nighttime use.  I just installed this 2330L in June to watch driveway activity as well as a scenic view.  Scenic view is nice but the resolution is not good enough for me to capture a person's face should an intruder enter the driveway.  Also, the single IR emitter on the 2330L is not sufficient to light up that area at night.  Will be looking at some of the cameras in Dlink's business section.  Will likely need to go with a POE camera.  This will require a hard wire to an access point.  I might be able to snake the POE cable through the cable TV holes in the concrete and save me the pain of drilling.  I'm planning on rearranging the locations of my IT equipment to near the cable holes.

One last possibility is to implement powerline wifi.  I have no experience with this and don't know what distances you can connect over.  My worst case connection would be from the router connection through potentially three breaker panels, one of which has a whole house surge protector (could be a problem since it might mitigate the powerline signal in the house wiringl) and then to the final destination.  Total distance run could be 100 feet as the wires run and through 3 circuit breakers.

If you have any experience with any of the POE higher resolution cams with at least 30 ft IR illumination I'd be interested in your suggestions.  Also experience with powerline ethernet connections would help.

[RYAT3]

So you have almost no ambient light?    Have you looked into IR (infrared) illuminators? (they can run hot)..

Can you install a motion sensor type light? (that would be with it's own separate risks).

[RYAT3]

TO RYAT3 :
That said, I'm going to be replacing the outside 2330L with a camera that has better resolution and also better IR illumination for nighttime use.  I just installed this 2330L in June to watch driveway activity as well as a scenic view.  Scenic view is nice but the resolution is not good enough for me to capture a person's face should an intruder enter the driveway.  Also, the single IR emitter on the 2330L is not sufficient to light up that area at night.  Will be looking at some of the cameras in Dlink's business section.  Will likely need to go with a POE camera.  This will require a hard wire to an access point.  I might be able to snake the POE cable through the cable TV holes in the concrete and save me the pain of drilling.  I'm planning on rearranging the locations of my IT equipment to near the cable holes.

2330L only promises 15ft.. how far do you need?    Have you tried the exposure mode: low noise option in the f/w with gain @ 24 at night?

I have 3 PoE cams.




POE cable is regular ethernet cables...Is it not?
The 2330L is PoE also (but has wireless option).

[remoteCamsFarAway]

I do have a motion light but right now it is too sensitive to motion and picks up the bushes blowing in the wind at night.  The light turns on and off frequently during the night and triggers motion detection as the lights turn on and off.  I either need to desensitize the sensor on that light or get a different light where I can more precisely focus the area to where it is sensitive.  On my list of things to do.

Didn't know that they made IR illuminators.  Interesting.  The camera is positioned 15 to 20 feet above the ground and pointed straight ahead for the scenic view.  At that height above the ground the camera's IR illumination is ineffective.  Separate illuminators would maybe otherwise solve this problem except that I need higher resolution.  Because of its height above the ground and how it's positioned it is not close enough to people's faces to make them out.  For security purposes, I want to be able to zoom into a recorded motion session and see who it was.

The 2330L does have a wired ethernet option but it is not POE (Power Over Ethernet) capable.

Will try to improve night vision with the suggested settings.

[remoteCamsFarAway]

See updates to my postings on June 28 and July 9.

[remoteCamsFarAway]

Over the last few days I've lost two of the three 2330L cameras again.  I didn't think to check for one of them but logs from the two 2630L cams show no power interruptions from the time the other 2330L cam was last working until we noticed it was gone.  In other words it disappeared for no reason.  Remote router access confirms that both cameras are no longer attached to the router.  Still have one more 2330L and two 2630L cams online.

I've tried scheduled reboots (decided hurt as much as it helped) and putting UPS on modem/router/AP (helps some but obviously not completely).  On my last trip there I brought some wifi power switches but decided not to install them.  At least if they worked properly I'd be able to remotely cycle the power on the cams when they disappear.  With things seemingly working while I was down there I decided not to mess with success.  Will need to wait until the end of October to add them into the system.

Called Dlink support.  Got case number but that's about it since I'm not on site.  They were suggesting a factory reset to clear the settings and try again.  However, I'm not sure that will help in the long run since I have three 2330L cams installed and they all suffer from the same disease.  On the assumption that this is a firmware bug and not a hardware failure, the only solution would be to roll it back to a version that did not fail or wait for a new version that fixes the problem or buy a remote power switch for every cam.  All three currently running FW 1.12.