This will be a rather lengthy post as I’ve put a lot of time into this. I’ll start at the beginning. I’ve inherited a number of Milestone Servers after a coworker took another position outside my company. At the time of this change, there was no test invironment to test potential changes, updates, etc… I’ve gone to work attempting to build a virtualized test environment as similar to our current production environment as possible. Our production environment consists of a mix of server 2008r2 and 2012r2 recording servers(physical) and a virtualized Master server running 2008r2, the SQL server is hosted seperately from the Master server in the production environment. My virtual environment runs a similar setup with a 2008r2 master server and 2 recording servers each being 2008r2 and 2012r2 respectively, with a seperate sqlexpress instance on 2012r2. I followed the installation instructions in the ‘Administrator’s getting started guide’ that I located from the milestone website, following the ‘distributed option’ instructions. After installation of the master server and recording servers, I set to work configuring the system to act as similar to our production environment, configured archival times, record time, etc. from the management client. So far so good. Here’s where I start to run into issues. My surviellance specialist has given me around 5 cameras to test with, Axis 211s. I factory defaulted them, configured them to take a static IP address from my orgs dhcp range. This differs from how our production environment is configured, they have their own subnet in a 10.x.x.x range without DHCP, so I’ve configured much of the network settings myself as per our network documentation ( I believe this might be a possible point of failure). Using the management client, I’ve added the cameras by their ip address to the recording servers and they’ve added sucessfully. When I went to try to view the cameras in the management client I found out that I couldn’t log in remotely but I could locally. After quite a bit of digging and reading, I found out that because I don’t have any names registered in DNS for these servers, I had to go to the management client, Tools, Registered Services, and change all of the URLS from the expected hostname to the IP addresses of Event Server, Log Server, Report Server, and Service Channel. This allowed me to authenticate to my test server as the AD User remotely. After that I found out that I’m not receiving video in either the management client or the smart client. I noticed a banner at the top of the smart client saying that the service channel was unstable. After digging around in the kb again I found out that this had to do with the time, I corrected a time issue on the servers and restarted the services (for good measure) and the banner has since gone away (at least so far) but I’m still not getting any video from the cameras to the Recording servers. I can verify that they’re not hitting the recording servers because the MediaDatabase file is empty dispite having these cameras connected to the recording servers for quite some time, and the shares that I’ve setup for them are not getting any data. The only message that I’m receiving from the management client is “No Video” and the error that I’m receiving from the smart client is “Connecton to server failed. Retrying…” I’ve gone in and manually configured the cameras to have the correct time zone and they are displaying the correct time though I didn’t think that would be a problem and I’ve manually set the IP address to the IP address that the cameras recieved from DHCP as well as subnet, default dns, and default gateway. Is there anything else that I’m missing?
Hello Michael,
Thank you for the detailed description. After reading your description, it sounds like a DNS issue, since the recording server doesn’t seem to be talking to the manamgent server, thus no video is appearing.
Here is a solution that should resolve your issue:
Description:
If you expect video to stream from recording server(s) in XProtect® Corporate or XProtect® Expert deployments, there are two main requirements of an XProtect® Smart (or Management) Client PC. The client must be able to:
a) Resolve the recording server’s DNS hostname
b) Connect to the recording server on port 7563
In situations where the port 7563 is reachable but there is no DNS server or name resolution, it may be necessary to modify the recording server’s configuration (RecorderConfig.xml) file. This is to ensure that the clients connect to the server’s IP address instead of hostname.
Solution:
On the recording server PC(s), the configuration file typically resides in [C:\ProgramData\Milestone\XProtect](file:C:/ProgramData/Milestone/XProtect) Corporate Recording Server
To edit this file:
- Stop the Milestone Recording Server service
- Open the RecorderConfig.xml in a text editor such as Windows Notepad
- Search for “” in the file’s contents and follow the instructions to modify the tag to look like the one below. (10.10.10.10 is an example only, use the actual IP address of the server.)
10.10.10.10
7563
After modifying the RecorderConfig.xml, you must restart the Recording Server for the modification to take effect.
And you need to restart the related Milestone services to get the associated processes to update the Recording Server address change.
E.g. Since the Event Server does not automatically update changes to the RS addresses, you need to restart the related Milestone services to make this happen.
If not restarted an error could be cameras added to a Map from a modified server, will display as Disabled (blinking yellow on the map) until the Event Server is restarted.
TIP: After the Recording Server restart, you can verify in the Management Client that the IP is used by selecting the Recording Server, then clicking the Info tab to ensure that “Local web server address” is corrected.
Note: You can find additional information and troubleshooting protocols in KB article #331. Editing the Windows HOSTS file on client PCs is an alternative solution to this problem when DNS name resolution is impossible.
I hope that helps! If there is anything else we can do for you, please let us know.
Cheers,
Josh Sweeney
Milestone Technical Support
Hello Michael,
The solution posed by Josh will most likely resolve your issue as I am sure that the root of the problem is the lack of DNS resolution. I would like to clarify however that the issue is with the Actual Smart Client and Management Client not being able to resolve the DNS name of the Recording Server service. Performing the modification to the recordingserver.xml as described in the article that Josh provided will force the Recording Server to broadcast its address as an IP address rather than a host name. Therefore when the Management Client and the Smart Clent attempt to retrieve video they can communicate. Additionally as stated in the article, the alternative process would be to add a hosts file entry to each Smart Client machine. In order to get the Management Client to show video you would need to add one to the Management Server as well.
Regards,
Chris Benefiel
Thank you both for your assistance, I can confirm that this recordingconfig.xml edit resolved the problem and I’m able to view video from my cameras.
I would like to make one clarification to Josh’s post, when you edit the RecordingConfig.xml you need to specify the recording server’s IP address, *NOT* the management server’s IP address like I erroneously assumed the first time I tried it.