Lost webcam on network

Question

I have an AXIS 211M webcam that I was reconfiguring for our school network. I changed the network settings from using a fixed IP address to using DHCP. Now I can no longer access the camera, as I don't know it's new IP address.

How might I go about finding the new IP of the camera (or otherwise accessing its config page) so I can set it back to a fixed IP?

Normally I would plug this into my router and look at the router's status page to list connected devices. I don't have access to another router right now, though, and there's no way I would be able to isolate the device on the school's router. I tried directly connecting it to my Mac (via TBolt-Ethernet bridge) but I can't figure out how to ping it.

Answer 1

Many devices have a label with their MAC address printed somewhere. If there is no such label on this particular camera, you can use the ideas in the previous answer by Ron to find the MAC address.

Once you know the MAC address and need to find the IP address, the next step will depend on whether the device supports IPv6. If the device does support IPv6 there is a good chance it will have a link-local address which was derived from the MAC address. In that case you can compute the IP address directly.

If the device only supports IPv4, you can use tcpdump or Wireshark to listen for traffic from that MAC address to learn its IP address. You may have to ping all devices on the segment in order to force the device to send a packet for you to see.

You could also look in the neighbor cache/ARP cache for the MAC address. But since that cache only contains addresses you have communicated with, you may still have to ping the device first before you will find its MAC in your cache.

A completely different approach is to connect to port 80 on every IP on the LAN (assuming the device has a web server listening on that port), and see if any of them reply with a familiar page. Due to the risk of finding a different device with a similar (or identical) config page instead of the intended device, I would only use this approach as last resort.

Answer 2

A couple of ideas;

1. When connected to your MAC, run wireshark and look for the DHCP requests. That will give you the MAC address, which you can then look up in your DHCP server.

2. Copy the MAC table from your router, and lookup the OUI name, which will likely give you a few candidates that you can then look up in your DHCP server.

When you find it, you should create a DHCP reservation for that MAC address, so you always know what the IP is.

Answer 3

If the axis camera is a poe device, you should be able to locate it on the poe switch due to it's power draw from the switch. Then as mentioned by Ron and kaspend, it should be easy to work out the ip address.

OTOH, if it isn't a poe device and still powered up, you could use a network scanning utility like nmap to scan the ip range provided by the dhcp server. Nmap is great to use if you want to know what is on your network: https://nmap.org/book/man-port-scanning-techniques.html

Or use one of it's variants that has a gui such as Zenmap:- https://nmap.org/zenmap

Answer 4

You can use the Axis IP Utility to find the camera on the local network, even if the IP address is wrong for that network. You can then use it to change the IP to the right setting. The tool can be downloaded from here http://www.axis.com/fi/en/support/downloads/axis-ip-utility

Also, as Ron Trunk said, Wireshark can help you find out what IP is configured in it by looking at the traffic going over the network, even though the IP might be wrong it'll still send some traffic.

The MAC address on Axis cameras is the same as the serial number, just add : in between every 2 numbers and letters. The serial number is printed on a small silver sticker on the camera, on the bottom on that model if I remember correctly.

You can also set the IP using ARP through the command line if you prefer, but you have to know the MAC (aka. serial number) of the camera to do so. It's exactly the same thing as the IP Utility does, but it might be useful in a pinch. See the cameras manual on how to do that, or just google "Axis ARP" or something along those lines.

Finally, you could reset it using the reset button on the camera, this will reset the camera to DHCP, and allow you to get connectivity back. I've seen some cases where the camera jams itself somehow, and you can access it even if you know the IP, and you can't reset it using the IP utility either. Then a reset is the only way to get the camera to behave itself.