Ubiquiti is driving me crazy!

[8writer]

I've been given the task of upgrading a dozen stores of this one company, to replace all the cheap and no-name NVR's for each site with a Ubiquiti UNVR. They love the Ubiquiti ecosystem, but they're too cheap to spring for all new cameras. So I made the mistake of assuming I could easily migrate their existing cameras onto the new recorder.
Big Mistake!

I have spent hours and hours trying to find a way to adopt these cameras - in one store, there are at least FIVE different brands: Dahua, ENS, Qsee, Hikvision? (those two only show up with HiTools Delivery, the newest form of SADP, I believe), and a couple of super-generic "ONVIF Cameras". Forums say that for each one these, I have to either (a) discover the credentials for each brand and camera, using THAT brand's interface, or (b) "resetting" each camera, which usually means taking it apart to press some reset button. For 21 cameras. Some up on the roof. Yikes!

Do any of you more-experienced installers know a way to migrate these puppies over to their new master, the UNVR? I thought about asking some AI to make me a program to hack each camera for its credentials, but that's pretty extreme.
And probably illegal. The former installer is long gone, and all the credentials went with him.

Any clues you can give me would be greatly appreciated. I have 16 more stores to do this with. Thankfully, they prob won't have 5 brands of cameras!

 

[Jimmyjames]

I hope you are being paid well. If I were in your shoes I would have a serious discussion with management regarding the state of things. Taking over network operations for 16 locations would warrant a hefty salary

 

[8writer]

I hope you are being paid well. If I were in your shoes I would have a serious discussion with management regarding the state of things. Taking over network operations for 16 locations would warrant a hefty salary

Oh, I'm an electrician, not a Network Engineer. I know just enough IT stuff to get into trouble. They've got an outside IT guru that deals with their bigger Network problems (and he complains about how cheap they are, too!)
I would be getting paid well, if I could only find a quicker fix to this old-camera adoption problem!

 

[Flintstone61]

Tell the if they really "love their Ubiquiti" ecosystem, They need to migrate the whole system to Ubiquiti, Not half of one, and six dozen of the other. And they need to get their IT involved in the Ip addressing and snooping for cameras sitting on LAN's of unknown origin.
They either need to get a Dahua NVR's or Dahua knock off's like Amcrest, and keep all the CAMS, or Keep the UBiquiti's and shit can all the non ecosystem cams.
So many of the Gotcha's with each manufacturer laying traps " works exclusively with Brand X" " some advanced features Not available in non Brand X NVR's"
I would use Chat GPT or Google AI to get answers.

 

[Flintstone61]

Tell them you've discovered the Camera ecosystem's are proprietary and mined with traps to use only cam x with nvr X or Cam Y with NVR Y, and Ubiquiti is one of those proprietary companies. And that you are effectively locked out of the mission as it stands, until they make a decision.
too cheap...fuck them...other people need electricians. you can make money somewhere else.

 

[Flintstone61]

Google Search

 

[Flintstone61]

Google Search

Ai will get you some definitive answers quickly.
You are going to need a mobile computer to get on the lan and run Advanced IP scanner, Config Tool from Dahua or Amcrest, and SADP, and start digging for web interfaces. If the last guy didn't leave any passwords to the NVRs thats awful.
The camera's in the "dahua ecosystem" will adopt the NVR's admin password if they are plugged into an NVR.
if they are on a POE switch, they still could have been given the Admin password for ease of management at each location.
If you can log into any of the old ones' you could save yourself a ton of time and effort doing factory resets,
which you will end up doing on a percentage of the Cams
and Murphy's law says it will be the most difficult locations that need resets.
Clown show for sure

 

[IdoiDaniel]

Oof, 16 more stores of this sounds like a nightmare I’d start by checking the old NVRs for saved camera usernames and passwords before touching the cameras. If those credentials are gone, resetting each camera might honestly be the least painful option. Doing that once per site is better than spending hours fighting every brand individually.

 

[Arjun]

Rule # 1 - Never commit unless you are able to convince a customer to migrate everything to one ecosystem - otherwise, just walk away. If you were doing this for your own business, then that would not matter. But seeing that you are doing this for one of your retail customers - EXPECT a lot of service calls. Its not worth it...trust me.

You can try to convince them to invest in several AI-Ports to work with third party cameras and UNVR, but even that still has its flaws - its not perfect.

You are better off deploying Blue Iris in that setting.

 

[8writer]

Google Search

Ai will get you some definitive answers quickly.
You are going to need a mobile computer to get on the lan and run Advanced IP scanner, Config Tool from Dahua or Amcrest, and SADP, and start digging for web interfaces. If the last guy didn't leave any passwords to the NVRs thats awful.
The camera's in the "dahua ecosystem" will adopt the NVR's admin password if they are plugged into an NVR.
if they are on a POE switch, they still could have been given the Admin password for ease of management at each location.
If you can log into any of the old ones' you could save yourself a ton of time and effort doing factory resets,
which you will end up doing on a percentage of the Cams
and Murphy's law says it will be the most difficult locations that need resets.
Clown show for sure

Thanks, FS61 - you even did the search for me! Yeah, that's about what I've found so far in my own research and experimenting. Yesterday I did hook up with my laptop on the lan and ran Angry IP Scanner (to me, it's less confusing than Advanced), downloaded several tools (Smart PSS, NVMS 2.0, HiTools which is SADP, and another one) and proceeded to scour the IP's of everything on the list. Hours of thrilling madness.

I did manage to find the exact model numbers of the ENS cameras and Ispy showed me that three were Qsee cams and that one was a generic "ONVIF Camera", which really helps. HiTools only showed two of them - the "ONVIF" I just mentioned, and one other one, but no model number or anything useful. I've got port numbers on most of them - all the ENS are on 9008 and the rest are pretty much on 85. Logging into the IP of each camera, I can get to the web interface of some of them, but it's a locked door. Credentials would sure be good to have.

As I said, I'm no IT guru. So I'm just guessing that the three different IP address groups I ran into are different "VLAN's" set up in ages past. Most of the ENS cams are on 10.151.151.101 through 115. Then there's a group that starts with 20.0.0.101 through 109. But let's not leave out the Qsee and ONVIF which reside at 10.1.0.119 to about 126. I prob need to change all this to just ONE group with sequential numbers, but again, I have to log into each camera to do that. [cue sound of tire going flat...]

Another response on this thread said I might be able to extract credentials from the old NVR somehow. THAT would be GOLDEN. Any idea how to do that?

 

[8writer]

Oof, 16 more stores of this sounds like a nightmare I’d start by checking the old NVRs for saved camera usernames and passwords before touching the cameras. If those credentials are gone, resetting each camera might honestly be the least painful option. Doing that once per site is better than spending hours fighting every brand individually.

Daniel, that's the best idea I've heard, but HOW do I go about that? It's a 16 Port NVR that had a separate switch connected for the additional 4 or 5 cameras. I'd LOVE to dissect its brain, but HOW?

 

[8writer]

Rule # 1 - Never commit unless you are able to convince a customer to migrate everything to one ecosystem - otherwise, just walk away. If you were doing this for your own business, then that would not matter. But seeing that you are doing this for one of your retail customers - EXPECT a lot of service calls. Its not worth it...trust me.

You can try to convince them to invest in several AI-Ports to work with third party cameras and UNVR, but even that still has its flaws - its not perfect.

You are better off deploying Blue Iris in that setting.

Yeah, I've learned some valuable lessons from this one, for sure. But since you seem to know something about the U (Ubiquiti) universe, could I use one of the AI-Port devices to get access to one camera at a time and then change the settings and credentials? I've done 2 of these stores before this, but one was a new store, so all were U cams - no problem. The other store had old cams BUT the credentials were default, so could log in and change things. THIS one is a different story.

 

[Arjun]

Yeah, I've learned some valuable lessons from this one, for sure. But since you seem to know something about the U (Ubiquiti) universe, could I use one of the AI-Port devices to get access to one camera at a time and then change the settings and credentials? I've done 2 of these stores before this, but one was a new store, so all were U cams - no problem. The other store had old cams BUT the credentials were default, so could log in and change things. THIS one is a different story.

When it comes to managing the camera settings, all the AI-Port does is give the ONVIF cameras AI capabilities through UniFi Protect. You will have to configure camera settings in each Camera UI individually - not through UniFi Protect. There is a very limited number of settings can be configured for ONVIF cameras in UniFi Protect (i.e. recording resolution and fps)
To date, UniFi has not brought full compatibility with ONVIF, therefore SMD via ONVIF does work to an extent, but AI-based controls on Dahua camera for example are not transferable to UNVR / UniFi Protect - for that you need to put in an AI Port which supports 4-5 ONVIF cameras (provided the cameras are 2mp), for higher resolutions, the number of ONVIF cameras supported drops to 2-3 cameras; you can buy as many AI Ports as you like