Automate Restart of D-Link DCS-900 Cameras

I have some older D-Link DCS-900 cameras being used with ZoneMinder for a security system at home.

While these cameras are normally very stable (no lock-ups for weeks or months at a time) it still happens. To make things work more smoothly, I decided to find a way to restart the devices with cron.

I decided to have the cameras be reset twice a month (on the 1st and 15th of each month at 4am).


crontab -e

0 4 1,15 * * wget –http-user=admin –http-password=YOUR-PASSWORD -O /dev/null –post-data=”Reset= Yes ” http://camera1/Reply.html

 

You can remove the –http-user and –http-password sections if you do not have an admin user/password set.

6 thoughts on “Automate Restart of D-Link DCS-900 Cameras”

  1. Hi, I tried doing this but I’m getting:

    HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 404 File Not Found
    2010-12-14 22:20:02 ERROR 404: File Not Found.

    of course I’m changing the URL of “Camera1” to the IP of my camera, and I’m using the proper admin login credentials.

    If I try to pull up /Reply.html on my camera from a web browser it’s not found there either.

    Mine is a DCS-900 A version and the firmware is 2.51 (2006-11-29).

    Any ideas? Thanks!

  2. All my DCS-900s are running 3.22 (2006-11-22) however there are two different models of the DCS-900 (There is a REV. A and B)

    Who would have thought the web interfaces would be different! 🙂

    REV As latest firmware is 2.51 and Bs is 3.22 so I must be running a B and you an A.

    If you could, go into your web interface and find the page that lets you restart the router (For me this is Tools – Reset – Do you want to refresh this device?) and let me know the URL and source code of the page. With that information I’ll be able to craft a command for that revision as well. 🙂

  3. Hi Termina,

    Thanks for the info on the different versions as well as the tip–turns out that the page for version A is just Reply.htm instead of .html. Go figure! Your command seems to work just fine by substituting .htm for .html (I say “seems to” because I’m not on site to visually inspect the camera but it does lose ping connectivity briefly so my assumption is that it is doing the reboot.

    My next adventure with this will be trying to flash it with more capable firmware. Supposedly these DCS-900s are based on the old SparkLan CAS-200 camera, and the same design was used for various Trendnet and Airlink101 cameras (and others too I’m sure). Seems like D-Link is the only one to leave out the ability to e-mail and ftp images, which are actually pretty useful to have! So next time I’m on site I think I will get adventurous and try to flash a Trendnet firmware over to my DCS (there are a couple reports on the web of people doing this with success).

    I’m actually pretty impressed with this little cam. I can’t think of too many other devices from circa 2005 that I’m still using!

    Anyway, thanks again for the quick response and for the initial tip on the automated restart–works great!

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