We’ve had a theme of interoperability standards and protocols going here for a week now and I thought I’d continue the trend.

Did you ever wonder why you can go to your local big box retailer, buy one of any number of cable or DSL routers, plug it in at home and it just works? And, more amazingly, you can plug just about any computer into the switch port of that router and volia, you can surf the Internet without configuring anything? Well, welcome to the world of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol or DHCP for short.

Did you know that this standard was published just 15 short years ago as RFC 1531 ?

Back in those days, you couldn’t hook just any computer to any router, nor any router to any network without a lot of hand-configuration and related FM (and I don’t mean a field manual).

In fact, back in those days, Dan Lynch formed a really useful set of conferences known as “Interop” that were used as field tests to demonstrate fundamental interoperability of various router and equipment vendors.

It’s a wonderful world these days now that all this network stuff just plugs-and-plays together.

If only it could be so for IP cameras…

If I want to setup a video surveillance network (on my LAN) with IP cameras and camera management software, I had better do some homework to insure the camera vendor works with the surveillance software. Chances are, it will probably work if you stick to name brands and especially if you buy the software and hardware from the same company.

What if I want my IP camera to work with an MVaaS provider ? Stay tuned tomorrow for that answer.