3. Administration

Settings can be changed by clicking on Administration (Figure 6). Here some basic settings and NTP (Network Time Protocol) can be set.

Figure 6: System Administration screen
(click on image to enlarge)

The logs (Figure 7) can also be accessed through the Administration screen. The log records events such as the time when the camera turned on, when motion was detected and email errors. You can copy and paste the log into your favorite word processing program, but there is no option to have a periodic dump into an alternate location. The logs are flushed when power is cut.

Figure 7: Log sample

The Network Settings (Figure 8) page is pretty standard, but has one nice feature. You can set a secondary port (other than 80) for web connections, which is great because some older routers can only do straight port forwarding with no port translation.

Figure 8: Network Settings screen
(click on image to enlarge)

I found Email Alerts (Figure 9) harder to set up than they should be. You can set email alerts to have text and / or video attachments, with alerts fired off when motion is detected in the zones you select (the screen is divided into a three by three grid, and you select the areas to sense motion in ). Videos are in MPEG4 .ASF format and are can be set to be from two to five seconds in length and include audio.

Figure 9: Email alert setup
(click on image to enlarge)

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to test the sensitivity of the motion detector, i.e. no easy test button, no preview screen. So you must jump into the camera's view and then run back to your computer and check your email.

You can configure up to three email addresses to send alerts to, with all three addresses getting the same alert. It would have been nice to set one address to receive text and the others to receive video. Unfortunately again, there is no testing of email addresses. Other webcams have a convenient test button that sends a test email so that you can verify that your email settings are good. With the Actiontec camera, though, you enter the email address information, start dancing in front of the camera and then check your email. At least if there is a problem, it will say "Send e-mail error" in the logs.