Setting Up, Continued

The Wizare also helped me to select and configure an associated wireless access point (Figure 4). Note that both WEP and the more-secure WPA encryption are supported for securing your wireless connection. But when it came time to set the password used to control access to the camera, I was a bit surprised to find that I was limited to only using four characters.

Figure 4: Access point selection

Once the Wizard got through the basic setup, Internet Viewing setup was next. Figure 5 shows the initial screen of this setup phase. (Since the wizard runs only under Windows, I was somewhat amused to see a picture of an Apple iBook used.)

Figure 5: Internet Viewing Setup

This phase of the setup is supposed to automatically punch the necessary holes in your router's firewall. But for the firewall configuration to work, you must be using a router that supports the UPnP protocol. In my case, I was using a Linksys WRT54G which, although several years old, has UPnP support. But when I tried out the wizard, it was unable to complete the configuration (Figure 6). But since the network ports required were identified, I manually opened the ports myself using the WRT54G's menus. 

Figure 6: Setup error

This part of the wizard also walks you through configuring the camera for dynamic DNS. Hawking is partnering with TZO to offer a free 75 day trial of TZO's Standard dynamic DNS and Web relay services. The services let you register a unique domain name for the camera, which is kept pointed to the IP address assigned to your router by your ISP.

The service lets you remotely access the camera over the Internet - although not through a secure (https) connection) - without having to keep track of your IP address when it changes. Note that after the trial period expires, having an easy-to-remember name for your camera will set you back $25 a year. This part of the setup went uneventfully and the TZO service worked as advertised.

Tags: Hawking, Network camera,

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