Find an IP cam on your network when the software won’t
For a large number of reasons I’m in the office today working on Memorial Day, but one of these is that I have to have some time to configure some cameras without people interrupting me or things exploding.
While I’ve been typing this I have a fatal media error on one of my servers, an air conditioner failed at a rental unit, and the third camera I’m configuring has no power, my plant needed watering, five phone calls, etc… great day off let me tell you.
We’re connecting them into two systems we have (the poor man’s FTP solution and Blue Iris,) and we’ve got a bunch of IP cameras and today decided to be the day that the IP scanner software just failed.
My network is huge… I mean, there’s not a lot of people on it but I have over 65535 addresses in the scope because, well, it’s never been an issue in 19 years until today. When I can’t find a camera, or any camera for that matter.
Scanning in the DHCP range it should have been in returned no results from the IP Admin software, and running Angry IP scanner wasn’t narrowing it down for me.
Fortunately as I’m just setting the cameras up and assigning them IPs today, figuring out what’s broken with the Amcrest/Foscam IP scanning tools is not something I have to get done, just configure the cameras that are in my hand.
Each camera has a MAC address. We’re on the same switch as the cameras. Here’s what I did:
Open a command prompt
arp -a > tmp.txt
notepad tmp.txt
Notepad pops up, I take the last couple two numbers of the MAC address which are 13:A0, search the text for 13-a0 because of course it has to change formats, and viola I’ve got my IP address.
now I just log into the camera, move it into the assigned camera IP space, and boom. Don’t have to deal with badly written IP scanning software.
Should work for finding anything you’re on the same network with and know the MAC of.
