CGDiCCTV

Sorry its taken me so long to get back on this topic but I had to give myself a crash course in Linux. So here is what I found. No overheating on any component. I mounted the master hard drive on another Linux system and went through the logs. In /var/log/maillog I found several hundred entries regarding errors in the sendmail daemon. The errors occurred just prior to lock up. Could this be the cause of the problem or just a symptom? I went ahead and disabled the daemon on my most problematic unit. So far no lock up.

Last July, I installed 20 Tempest DVR's (mostly 9000 series a few 8000) for two of my best customers. In February, 3 of them locked up and would not reboot. I bought 3 new ones to replace the bad ones and immediately had problems with two of the new ones locking up. Since then I've had problems with 6 more units locking up. Up until last week, I'd only had problems with the 9000 series, but now the 8000's are starting to do the same thing. I've spent over 30 hours on the phone with Tempest tech support to no avail. They suggest reinstalling the software, which erases the video and does not fix the problem. Is anybody else having problems with these units? Does anybody have any possible solutions?

I've tried replacing the motherboard, power supply, video output card, and hard drives. As well as, adding case fans. So far nothing has helped. We haven't bothered with advance replacements for two reasons: 1) We purchased three new units (as i mentioned in my original post) and two were bad out of the box. 2) Tempest has been extremely difficult to deal with. I tried to explain to them that our customers are required by law to keep six months video history so I needed to keep the hard drives out of the bad units for six months. They charged me $155 for each 250 gig hard drive. I've had numerous other problems with Tempest, but there is not enough space here for me to relate all of them. As far as, loading the OS and drivers separately, this is a linux based unit and the OS is inseparable from the Tempest software. I've had several computer experts look at it and they can't find a way to separate them. I believe the problem may be in the proprietary Tempest capture cards. Each card has one BT878 capture chip which should capture 30 frames per second, yet Tempest claims a capture rate of 60 frames per second per card. I've set the capture rate at 5 frames per second yet on playback the capture rate seems closer to 10 frames per second. It seems the BT878 is being overclocked. There is an option in the software that is suppose to disable this feature but it does not seem to work. There is a relatively large IC on the capture card that I beleive modifies the function of the BT878.