MIlestone Configuration

[DaveChester 0]

Hi Guys,

 

I saw the other Milestone threads so thought this would be a good place to ask a question.

 

We have a holiday home with 13 AXIS IP cameras installed. The system works flawlessly when the client is away (but I guess it only records minimal amounts). When the family arrive the system gets hammered - maybe five or six cameras recording motion continuously. I struggle to work out a compromise between the two scenarios - occupied and unoccupied. I was hoping Milestone would be a bit more dynamic - record motion on all cameras at 1fps and overwrite when full would have been great.

Interestingly when the family are in residence the system seems to get bogged down after a couple of days and the PC needs rebooting. The network is good but the PC seems to run out of RAM (hard drive space is OK).

 

Any tips on how this system should be configured?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Dave

[hardwired 0]

We need a little more information here about the recording computer (processor, RAM, HDD sizing, OS, etc), Milestone version and device pack, and what framerate are you trying to get? Milestone is very flexible in recording option, but some are not so obvious (setting bitrate instead of framerate on some MPEG4 cameras, for example).

 

Take a look at the event log on the computer, and also the recording server log in C:\Program Files\Milestone\Milestone Surveillance, and see what correlates with the failure time.

 

Look especially for Event ID 4226 "TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts" in the Windows system event log, (if using XP).

 

XP has a problem with half-open TCP ports, there is a patch available to raise the number from 10 to 50 open connections, that may help.

 

The configuration you mention (motion record at 1FPS, overwrite when full) is available in the settings, what is it currently set at?

[DaveChester 0]

Thanks for the response.

 

The PC is a 2.8Ghz dual chip machine with 2Gb Ram. It has two hard drives - a local 500Gb and a 1Tb used for archiving.

 

The TCP ports is an interesting one as we have 13 cameras so I imagine that might cause an issue. In fact just checked and we have maybe a dozen errors and a load of TCP/IP warnings. I've just patched it so will see what effect it has. This would also tally with us seeing a reboot clear the problem (I assume this would clear unwanted connections).

 

Many Thanks for your help, I hope to be able to help you out some day too!

[hardwired 0]

You're welcome, hopefully that will fix the problem. You may also want to look into how large the partition selected for "First Day" storage is, if that is too small to hold a full day of recordings, you will run into problems.

 

Milestone is great software, but like any manufacturer, they have their quirks. Their phone tech support is very helpful, though.

[Suprfknman 0]

I have had issues like this previously I learned fast from my mistakes. If you have the software set up for motion recording only it will still record everything and then overwrite it if there is no motion. This is how you get pre-motion recording you can set say 3 seconds prior to and 3 seconds after the motion event. You have 13 cameras all recording onto one 500gb hard drive. Is the o/s on the same hard drive this will bog everything down. Then at least once a day the recording drive will archive to your archiving drive so now not only does the single 500gb hard drive have to write in 13 cameras now it has to write out also at the same time. One sata 7200 rpm hard drive cannot do this. Go buy a raid card and a few 10k sata raptors. Raid 10 is best mirror and stripe for the recording array or if you dont care about redundancy just stripe 3 of them for your recording volume this will give you enough disk speed to record and archive at the same time. Set it to archive at least 2 times a day.

Will