I have a very inconvenient problem with my node-red-contrib-onvif-nodes. Already multiple people have reported that the automatic discovery on Onvif devices doesn't work anymore with latest Github version. Perhaps it is a bug in my own code, but I have also updated to the latest version of the onvif library that I am using under the cover. Perhaps there is a bug in that library. I don't know ...
I have already done remote debugging this week on a remote camera from a user (which was made public via port forwarding). That worked fine to find the root cause. But now I need to be able to debug a WS discovery that is started by a Discovery node (from my own Node-RED flow) on somebody else his LAN.
Does anybody know an 'easy' way to do that? Don't have much time at the moment to start studying about this subject, or to setup complex network stuff ...
The easiest way would most likely be for them to provide you with a remote NGROK or SSH session that would let you use port forwarding so that you could forward the remote discovery ports to your own network. Not sure how easy that actually is though as I've never done it with WS Discovery.
The easiest from your perspective would be for them to provide you with a full private VPN connection because you would then actually be on their network and discovery should work as it would locally, you would have an IP address on their LAN which is what you really want for TCP broadcasts.
Yep your really need something like an OpenVPN or some such that terminates you in their main network segment- not on a subnet that is routed.
Depending on how the devices implement the WSD stuff they may be being lazy and just doing UDP broadcasts - as such these will not travel across a subnet (as it is routed), so you will need something that is bridged onto the same segment as the devices.
Thanks Craig!
The pblem is that this is quite complex. When some guy ask me why his IP cam doesn't show up when executing an Onvif discovery, I can hardly ask: "Hey no problem, just setup a VPN and allow me to start doing some crazy stuff on you local network" And automatic disvovery is used often by less technical skilled people...
And automatic disvovery is used often by less technical skilled people...