Ever go into MxCC to review an event, only to discover there is no recording for the event? A little further investigation and it turns out your cameras haven't been recording to the file server for several days now because the file server is down? This can be a very bad surprise, especially if it goes unnoticed for several days. Let's take a look at how to setup e-mail notifications from a Mobotix camera so you know about this problem as soon as it happens.
Admin Menu > E-mail Profiles
Here you configure the global sending e-mail address and server settings. Mobotix cameras running software older than v4.04.19 do not support sender e-mail accounts that require TLS/SSL authentication like Gmail, so I typically create a free account with www.gmx.com
Further down on the same page, I re-named the first template to “FileServerDown”, filled in the recipients list, and customized the message to be specific to the facility and file server details to help local personnel troubleshoot. Here’s our message as an example:
“You are receiving this e-mail because the cameras at the XYZ facility cannot reach the fileshare. Please investigate why \\w.x.y.z\fileshare is not reachable to resolve the issue. You will continue to receive this e-mail once every 2 hours until the problem has been resolved.”
Before setting up the trigger for the e-mail, you may first want to confirm the general e-mail settings are working properly. From the Admin Menu > Test Network Current Configuration, you can run a test on the E-mail Profile ‘FileServerDown’. There is a good troubleshooting popup that appears during the test that can display configuration problems; otherwise you should see the green success result like below. Note: some e-mail providers might mark inbound e-mail from gmx.com as junk, so the recipient should configure this domain/e-mail address as safe to receive the e-mails.
If the e-mail tested well, the final step is under Admin Menu > Storage Failure Detection. I didn’t care to e-mail on lost events here, only if the file server was unreachable. You’ll see below that we’ve configured the Storage Failure Detection to E-mail using the FileServerDown profile with a frequency of 2 hours until the issue is resolved. As always set and save all your changes.
And that's it! Now the system admin will receive an immediate and then periodic e-mails when there is a file server issue until it has been resolved.
Links of Interest
