General Solutions DVR

[rory 0]

Had a nice meeting with their Florida based sales Manufacturer Rep this morning, demo'd one of their windows XP Embedded DVRs. Tons of featurers. Nice unit, I may start carrying it as an alternative to the Kalatel DVRs, but still carry the Kalatel for those users who only want a front button controlled DVR. AS the GS one uses a mouse. They have their place definately, especially the XP embedded is pretty cool, its stripped right down version of windows.

 

Question, if you are only using it for the one thing, DVR, and have a router firewall, then no need for an anti virus right? Only thing I could think of if some one actually inserted a floppy/CD and clicked on a virus on that an then it could run.

 

Ofcourse I asked alot of questions, and suggested recommendations or at least what alot of us would like to see. It actually has alot of those 'wanted' features that most PC cards and ofcourse stand alones, dont have. They have other versions ofcourse.

 

http://www.generalsolutions.net/products/Digital_Video_Recorders.asp

the one I demo'd isnt on there but it looks like a storesafe, comes in black and has windows XP embedded, 240pps and 4 CIF. Price with 160GB is around the same as the Nuvico.

 

Rory

[Thomas 0]

You can't do anti-virus on XP embeded, unless the manufacture installs it for you. If you isolate it from the outside world, you should be okay. Floppy based viruses generally don't work in XP embeded due to the fact you don't have much that can run files.

[rory 0]

cool thanks...

[Bluto 0]

If the web service is running in the background of Embedded XP, it is still vunerable to worms.

[joe4 0]

Computer security depends on how much you want to risk vs. spend. If the DVR is a few thousand dollars I would expect a manufacture to spend a couple of bucks and install some AV.

 

If the client is monitoring a few million dollars worth of assets he will feel better knowing that there is at least AV running on the DVR.

 

http://www.sygate.com/solutions/xpe-solutions.php

or

http://ca.com/channel/oem/eav.htm

[Thomas 0]

AV software isn't a prevenitive measure, it only fixes the problem. Isolating the system with a firewall is a better solution.

[joe4 0]

I agree that the firewall is a must have, but AV is a preventative measure. With AV installed allot of viruses are disabled before causing a problem.

[Thomas 0]

It's fairly rare for AV software to prevent infections and the kind of infections they prevent are a non-issue for XP embeded. Stopping dangerous scripts isn't a big deal for an embeded system because there is no mail client or browser. Ideally this shouldn't be a problem on even normal systems because users shouldn't be using mission critical systems for web surfing.

 

Remember that on an XP embeded system any kind of virus is going spread via exploits that use existing services. AV software won't stop malformed packets or buffer overflows.

[kriton 0]

Rory, it would be wise to steer clear of General Solutions. I know they have a cool looking product, we almost started carrying it awhile ago. But they have long been rumored to be heading towards BK, so they might not be the best long term relationship, especially if you start selling alot of this stuff and they do go BK and your left hanging with all your customers that now have no factory support other than you.

[rory 0]

yeah i realise that, im looking at i-views DVR also .. it is much less in price and seems to have a few more features .. this being for the real time DVRs ..

[cctv_down_under 0]

AV software isn't a prevenitive measure, it only fixes the problem. Isolating the system with a firewall is a better solution.

 

very true point