Pat Clements

So, I bought a Night Owl camera / DVR system and got it installed this weekend. No, you can’t get near my house without being recorded, and backed up remotely. It’s a Night Owl Security L-85-8511, http://amzn.com/B00H7OEK1M.

I had a lot of trouble getting the Night Owl Lite software to access my box remotely. I’m not sure what the exact cause is, but here are the steps that appear to have made it rock solid. If you’re not technical, you might not be able to understand what any of this means. I assume you’ve already registered your DDNS name on nightowldvr.com. Oh, and I have a Xfinity X1 Comcast-provided router/wireless device.

1. Reserve a static 10.x address for the MAC address of your DVR.
2. Go to Advanced in your router setup. Configure port forwarding for the static IP address you reserved in Step 1. Make the port 2050 start, 2050 end. That’s essentially a NAT function in the Comcast router. You’ll have to figure that out on your router if you have something different.

When you configure the Night Owl Lite software on your iPhone, it should work solid.

I think the problem lies in the fact that your home network is a many-to-one hide NAT configuration (many private IP addresses hiding behind one public IP address.) When your Night Owl Lite software makes the connection to your Internet router’s public address, it has no idea which host to send the traffic to on port 2050 and it barfs. By building the forwarding port (NAT) it forces inbound connections on 2050 to always go to the reserved private address of the DVR. The unusual thing was when I very first set it up, it worked. It broke later after I was monkeying with my router physical setup. Seems solid now. Hope this helps someone.