By default, your router will randomly assign IP addresses to different devices and servers on your LAN or home network. You do not want this because you will end up configuring "port forwarding" to aim at a moving target. Sometime after everything seemed to work (meaning you could access things from remote sites), everything will just "stop" even though your TZO account is running just fine. The cause of this is inside your network, due to the server/device NOT having been configured to use a LAN IP which is statically set. So for an example, you might have configured port forwarding to send traffic to a camera running on "192.168.1.101". Then after some days later (or after a power outage), you can not remotely access. It might not be convenient to travel back on-site to see what the network is doing, but when you do you notice the camera now uses "192.168.1.100". Of course your router is still port-forwarding to 192.168.1.101... and that traffic probably goes nowhere and times out. While this is not anything TZO can remotely fix - it is something internal to your network - all of our tutorials will suggest putting a static LAN IP on whatever it is you want to remotely access.

This FAQ last updated: 04/29/2010 - 16:49