"My camera system doesn't work during the night" Tech Support |
| "My camera system doesn't work during the night" Posted: 25 Aug 2019 10:15 AM PDT I work as tech support for a company that sells access control, alarm and video surveillance products. I'm on the phone all day, helping installers with any technical issue they could have with our products. I get a call from a technician that is his own boss, he's kind of a one man show. He has no employee and mostly does small business or residential camera system installations, so when he calls, it's never a real, unsolvable issue. He installs lower end cameras and DVRs that are pretty much plug and play. So he calls me, and he's at his customer's location, which is a small family owned business. His customer is right next to him. The problem is that "His camera system is not recording at night". Okay, I get calls like this every day. I'm 99% sure the problem is that he didn't set the schedule correctly. So I walk him through the menus, and he slowly makes his way to the Storage Schedule section. After having him tell me what he sees on the screen, we determined that the recording schedule for his storage is not the problem. There is another section in the menu where you can enable motion detection to work only at certain time, so I help him navigate to that section, but it was set for 24/7. So the issue wasn't in the DVR menu. At this point I'm thinking that he went into each individual camera's setting, and it's the camera themselves that doesn't have the right schedule. We can't browse the web interface of the camera when it's on the DVR, unless you have a laptop and some ipv4 knowledge. So I have the technician grab his laptop in his truck and I walk him through setting up his network card to the right IP. After about 30 minutes of back and forth, he finally gets to one of the camera's web interface, only to realize that the schedule was left by default, with the right settings. So that wasn't the issue either. At this point all my ideas were shot down. The technician kept on saying that the issue was with the product, but I knew it was almost impossible. I had a look at the time the videos would stop and start recording. It was never at the same time. Sometimes it would start at 6:30 am and stop at 9:20PM, sometimes it was 7 AM to 8PM. So the technician puts his customer on the phone. I ask him about what he does when he gets in the morning, what times does he leaves at night, and what he does before leaving. It turns out, the first thing the guy does when he gets to work in the morning is flick the light switch on and turn on his PC. Then when he goes home at night, he turns off the light before walking out of the building. I ask him to turn off the light right now. He does, and the DVR immediately shuts down. His DVR was plugged in on the same outlet as the lights, so it's only working when the lights are on. Needless to say, the technician was super embarassed. We were on the phone for about 50 minutes before we realize what's going on. I guess the moral of this story is that you can't assume that anything is properly installed, you and should start the troubleshooting process to the very basics, even if it seems stupid obvious. [link] [comments]  |
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