Hawking HNC210

I have been interested in getting a network camera for a while.  I like the concept of having devices connected directly to the network, without needing a computer to be running.  A while ago, I saw that woot was selling the Hawking HNC210 network camera, so I decided to get one.

The setup was pretty easy.  Even though, officially, it only supports Windows PCs for configuration, I was able to set it up on my mac.  All the windows config tool does is looks for any cameras on the network, and presents them in the UI.  Then the tool will set you set the ip address.  You can do the same thing without the PC app, as the web server is always running on the camera.  All you need to do is determine the ip address that the dhcp server sent to the camera.  You can either do network map, or look at the dhcp status page on most broadband routers.

Once I configured a static ip address, I was able to use the web interface to view the video from the camera, from within our network.  Then I tried to configure camera and router, so I could see the video from outside of our network.  This didn't work that well.

I port forwarded a port to get to the camera on the router.  When I attempted to log in to the camera using my external ip address, I was prompted for my username and password.  Once I entered, the next page asked me for the same credentials again.  I have not been able to log in when using the external ip address.

When I looked at the cookies installed in Firefox, I only saw the cookies from this camera that were using the internal ip address as the realm.  So it appears that the web server on this camera is using the wrong domain when sending cookies to the browser.  I think that it is sending the internal ip address as the domain for the cookie, instead of leaving the browser to use the default.

So if I want to get this to work, I will have to set up some type of proxy to get the video out.