ACTi equipment

[tomeb 0]

I've ran across some posts regarding the ACTi equipment. We are thinking about offering this line to our customers, can I get some constructive feeback from the experts??

 

Thanks

[WirelessEye 0]

ACTi is a very good company. I've dealt with their biggest competitor (Axis) and I must say ACTi's support and responsiveness is 1 billion times better. Some product features are miles ahead of Axis as well, but others are lacking. I have been talking directly to some of their development staff directly, leading them to offer some stuff that will be hitting the market soon.

 

I'd offer their line of products, they are still up and coming, but they're hungry.

[tomeb 0]

Thanks for the info!

[eganson 0]

The streamer we have has run flawlessly for 10 months now, mounted up in a tree. It got pretty hot during the summer and froze a few weeks through the winter. (no heating or cooling in the enclosure) Still alive and streaming flawless video, so it appears to be pretty tough. I was surprised the heat didn't kill it... the thing works great, and keeps on running... definitely something to offer your customers.

We never did determine why it contacts hinet.net whenever a user selects the 'system info' and I never heard back from Acti's support either. Since this one is still up in the tree streaming, I haven't been able to tap the 'listen' side of the streamer to see what packets hinet.net sends back to it, if any. I tried, but the cat-5 that long didn't work; it shuts down the streamer trying to passively tap there. All I see are the packets it sends to sites which are not the video-stream recipient. I need an active tap maybe?

Over a period of 2 days, it contacted 26 individual IP addresses, mostly returning errors in response to what look like attempted exploits. It appeared nobody got access to the video stream, and the majority (11) of these came from china. (None were from Taiwan) This may have nothing to do with the ACTi SED2100R contacting hinet.net, but it makes me curious how some of these guys find the streamer, and why they kept trying things on it..

I'd like to know if others here find similar situations with IP streamers or cameras, since you can hide a lot of data within the video traffic, if nobody watches those packets. Non-issue in a LAN environment though..

[nextan 0]

I have deployed more than 300 channels of ACTi's products since a year ago in the South East Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia and Phillipines. These countries are all in the hot and humid tropical region where daytime temperature constantly go above 30 degrees Celcius and as high as 36 to 38 degrees.

 

Have not encountered any reliability problem so far, and the MPEG4 ASP codec is extremely bandwidth friendly, ideal for remote live monitoring.

 

2 of my projects are featured on ACTi website:

 

http://www.acti.com/Press_RoomV2/News.Asp

 

(The Singapore Marina Barrage and Pinnacle@Duxton construction projects)

 

Both have been implemented for more than 6 months in a very hash outdoor construction environment, especially the Marina Barrage project.

 

You can view the live streaming of the Marina Barrage project here:

 

http://www.pub.gov.sg/Marina/camview.htm

[msecure 0]

Well, I too was an ACTI believer but that was before I went to the SecuTech show. After seing some of their competitions, my conclusion now is that they maybe in the 3rd or 4th place at most. However, since I only have the chance to see the demo, the actual robustness of the said VS from their competitors will only be known after actual field testing. I have a 4 channel sample from 1 of them & I'll give you guys the IP once I put it up.

[rory 0]

From Research, "so far" Acti is the only one that can do D1 at such a low bandwidth.

[eganson 0]

Has anybody else here tried monitoring the network traffic to or from their streamers? It's not hard to do using Ethereal, set to capture traffic which the device sends to IP addresses other than you intended. I found that it doesn't affect the video stream at all when 'talks to strangers'... you'll never know if you don't check. I'm curious if ours is an isolated incident, or if this is something to beware of in other IP video products as well?? Unless you prohibit it from accessing the WAN, firewalls won't help. It talks out, and external sites respond.

Consider whether you really want hackers, or whoever, seeing all of the video streams? Or using your video server for other purposes? (it is a web server )

I'll see if it goes away after a firmwareupdate...

[micpecc 0]

Hey Guys:

I am one of the few ACTi distributors here in the US... I have been pushing their products for well over a year now. You just can't beat the performance & reliability for the price. They are extemely responsive to customer requests, and they are one of the most supportive & ethical companies that I deal with.

 

Besides the free software they offer (which is pretty darn good), there are now several 3rd party software companies that provide support - Milestone, ONSSI, D3Data, Imron.

And for Enterprise class applications, Ortega InfoSystems is pretty incredible. PlanetCCTV, another enterprise-class software package we offer will also have support for ACTi soon.

 

Mike Peccatiello

THE VIDEO SPECIALISTS

www.thevideospecialists.com

[nextan 0]

I have checked though a couple of my deployment following your method, don't seem to have such occurence, only 1 of the speed domes which is put on email snapshot notification is accessing the WAN once in a while.

 

All my deployment have been upgraded to A1D-1.03.06-AC firmware, will try to flash a test unit to the older firmware and see.

 

 

Has anybody else here tried monitoring the network traffic to or from their streamers? It's not hard to do using Ethereal, set to capture traffic which the device sends to IP addresses other than you intended. I found that it doesn't affect the video stream at all when 'talks to strangers'... you'll never know if you don't check. I'm curious if ours is an isolated incident, or if this is something to beware of in other IP video products as well?? Unless you prohibit it from accessing the WAN, firewalls won't help. It talks out, and external sites respond.

Consider whether you really want hackers, or whoever, seeing all of the video streams? Or using your video server for other purposes? (it is a web server )

I'll see if it goes away after a firmwareupdate...

[normicgander 0]

eganson,

 

Did you inform ACTi about these "outbound" communications? I think it would be a concern it any IP device trys to communicate to external sources without the owners authority. But hey I'm not an IT guy and still learning.

[micpecc 0]

Response back from ACTi regarding this issue:

 

"Thanks for customer's input and we totally agree with him that the video encryption is important. However, in our current design, we didn't setup the video streaming protection on our hardware. If hackers get the IP address, ID and PW then they can access to that IP device. They can also use the Ethereal to capture the traffic. Currently, we survey all products in the market, like AXIS, Sony, VCS..etc. all of them didn't do the video encryption yet. We focus on providing stable and good video quality first and the video encryption will be spec in our next generation product."

 

Stay tuned...

 

The Video Specialists

US ACTi Distributor

[normicgander 0]

Thanks for the response. However, in the big scheme of things, the issues of this thread concerns me. As someone who's wanting to deploy IP devices over WANs and the Internet, I'm going to have to research this topic more throughly. At the IP TechSec, the whole nexus of this conference was IP was ready for prime time and that analog cameras and DVRs were going out the window. Now I'm not too sure....

 

Staying Tuned...

[frosted 0]

to be honest you just need to keep the network of ip gear in its own "network" enviroment and employ hardware key encryption devices. although to be honest its not hard and this should be in the kit. next generation ? sigh!

[normicgander 0]

The whole purpose of using the IP network is to reduce cabling installation costs. The IT folks I deal with have no problems with the camera streams and bandwidth on the LAN. The bottle necks are typically with the WAN. That being said, they would be concerned with the issues raised in this thread.

[normicgander 0]

I neglected to also say that remote or PC viewing is an important purpose...

[micpecc 0]

That is one area where the ACTi products work well - all the products have two ethernet ports (one for LAN and one for WAN).

Foe example: WAN port can be throttled down, and the LAN port can be set for full frame-rate onsite recording/viewing.

[eganson 0]

I had emailed Acti support on the issue of the streamer contacting hinet.net, but never got any response. It was nothing urgent, but more of a curiousity as to why it does that. Then the hits start coming in to it, none successful and over half were from china. Most likely unrelated to the streamer initiating contact with hinet.net, but there's the question...

So now it's back up and streaming with port 80 exposed to the internet so we can see what happens... Capturing packets it sends out, we'll see if there's a profound change once I select the 'system info' & it contacts hinet.

My guess is that it's an issue with the older firmware it's running...

Agreeing that encrypted video would be very nice, I think we should start by limiting who our servers talk to. Some sort of IP address filtering seems in order? (no hackers have obtained the video stream, login or password, but many were attracted to the device... their lack of success also speaks well of the Acti SED2100r)

[micpecc 0]

Yes, I definitely recommend setting up IP filtering on your router to prevent unwanted visitors to your video encoders/IP cameras... some routers will even allow filtering by MAC address.

Also, change the port for the web server to something other than port 80.

[micpecc 0]

Just got the scoop from ACTi on the "www.hinet.net" thing:

 

"Hinet.net is an ISP in Taiwan and the www.hinet.net page is always online. We set this default link to check video server's WAN status.Video server will ping 'www. hinet.net" to determine whether this video server/ IP camera is connected to the internet. So, customer can see "WAN Connect Status: Connect" in the system info page at web configurator."

[rory 0]

kinda makes sense, but if that 3rd party web site, hinet, goes down ......

[eganson 0]

Thanks micpecc, I thought there'd be a good reason for that. Once you find the 'english' button on their site, you can see that hinet has quite the presense there.

There's also NO correlation between the streamer pinging hinet (hitting the 'system info') and the incoming hack attempts to the server.

Nobody has breached it yet either; Acti's little SED2100R only gives them error codes while streaming reliable, uninterrupted video to the connected PC's. (Video-recording PC is connected through the WAN port, via internet, and the streamer connects to cgi.tzo.com for DDNS)

In nearly a year of real-world field testing and abuse, the only way we've made this thing stumble was with power interruption and physical network connection interruption. It recovers on it's own and continues streaming very quickly. This IS one solid, reliable streamer!