Month: October 2016

I’ve had two Foscam security cameras (model FI9805W) for a few years, and I’ve been able to view their image and adjust their settings with no problems using the official plugin in Safari, which worked fine on Sierra too.
However, I recently purchased a third camera (model FI9828P V2), and its plugin didn’t work with macOS Sierra.

Thankfully, I stumbled upon a post in the Foscam forums that provided a working version of the plugin. I took the liberty of uploading to my blog as well, you can download it from here (here you can find an older version).

UPDATE for macOS High Sierra

The plugin still works with macOS High Sierra, but I found a newer version that works with more cameras, including the FI9851P V3 which I recently purchased.

UPDATE for Safari 12 and macOS Mojave

Foscam has published a new, different kind of plugin that works with Safari 12 and macOS Mojave. Newer firmwares for newer cameras link to this plugin (my FI9900EP does, for example) when trying to access their web UI from Safari. Their SSL certificate is broken but other than that the plugin installs and works just fine. Again, I’m mirroring the installer here for posterity.

Alternative solution for Safari 12 and macOS Mojave

Foscam’s VMS app works fine, is a native Mac app and seems to have most of the features the web UI had (for example PTZ controls on my FI9828P V2 seem to be missing/not functional, I’ll have to investigate further on that).

Install the app
Launch it
Login as admin with no password
Add your cameras
Enjoy!

I took the liberty to mirror the app here on my blog, in case it should no longer be available from Foscam in the future.

Even though I’ve shifted all the routing functionality of my LAN to the excellent pfSense (and specifically to a PC Engines alix2d2, for the time being), DD-WRT still plays a role in my network, since it powers a couple of my access points.

ddwrt

One of its key features that I rely on is the ability to make two or more SSIDs available, bridging the wireless networks to different VLANs in order to separate them. I have a couple of them at the moment, but the main “secondary” network is the guest one.

On my guest network, I want to prevent any access to DD-WRT (such as the web interface, SSH management, and so on). AFAIK, there’s no graphical way to do so in the admin panel, so I resorted to a quick iptables rule.

iptables -I INPUT -i br1 -d <DD-WRT's IP on guest net here> -j DROP

Basically this tells the firewall to DROP every packet that comes in from the br1 interface (make sure it’s the correct one in your config) and that is destined to its IP address on that interface.

To save and apply this rule log into the web interface, go to Administration/Commands, paste the command above (make sure you’ve inserted the correct IP) and then click on the “Save Firewall” button. Done.

Note: with this rule DD-WRT will be unreachable from that VLAN/SSID, even to you, so you’ll always have to access it from the main VLAN/network.