Tonight (on my mother's birthday no less) I got my new Axis wireless network camera working. Another networking triumph........
First I had to wrestle with the usual bad and/or incomplete instructions, but I managed to get it working wired (using standard ethernet cable). Then after much ado, I got it working wirelessly.
The instructions DO NOT make clear that there is a standard web based interface that you can use by pointing browser to the IP address of the camera, which out of the box is 192.168.0.90. Then I had to set a user name and password, which I set to "root" and "arbie" (come on...nobody's reading this). The instructions are also ambiguous about whether or not the camera can get its IP address from a dhcp server. The instructions say "A network DHCP server is optional". What the hell does that mean exactly? It should say "The 207w camera is capable of getting its IP address from your dhcp server if you have one. If not, all is not lost; you can set the IP address manually."
After some scuffling with my 871 wireless router, I got the 871 to give the 207w an IP address (by dhcp). Then using the camera's web config interface, I added a 26 hex digit wep key and then unplugged the ethernet cord and expected to be disappointed. But no! I saw myself clearly in my Coco Beach T shirt...wireless!!
The scuffling with the 871 wireless router involved me not knowing that if you delete the vlan 1 interface (which I did because I thought it wasn't necessary and why not simplify the config?) from the 871 config, the built in RJ45 jacks quit working. The wirelessly connected computers still work, but anything plugged into the RJ45 jacks go south. I'm confused about why, but then I'm confused about a lot of things in networking.....
Anyway, after I re-added the vlan 1 interface to the 871 config, the RJ45 jacks instantly started working again and so the 207w camera was issued an IP address by dhcp. Then I could surf to its IP address and enter the wireless ssid and hex wep key and get going wirelessly.
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