Setup Android BI

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santamen
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Oct 06, 2019 12:34 pm

Setup Android BI

Post by santamen »

Need detailed help to setup my Blue Iris android application because I really don't understand nothing Wan Lan Port etc. everithing is too complicated for me and I'm not good in english term. Thanks in advance for your precious time.
P.S. I'm running BI 4 and my setup was done by someone else long time ago. Still running in my PC without any problem.
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TimG
Posts: 2098
Joined: Tue Jun 18, 2019 10:45 am
Location: Nottinghamshire, UK.

Re: Setup Android BI

Post by TimG »

I can't remember how much BI android has changed between BI4 and BI5, but I think it was as simple as:

1. Being on the same wifi network as the BI pc.
2. On the BI android app, editing settings, and adding the first 5 and last 5 letters of your BI licence, and clicking on "GET IPS".
3. If you then add the username and password that you set up on the BI PC for the mobile user, you should able to connect.

Remote access comes after this is working :!:
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HeneryH
Posts: 678
Joined: Thu Jul 18, 2019 2:50 pm

Re: Setup Android BI

Post by HeneryH »

The real issue here is that eventually you will need to understand how networking and port forwarding works to be successful. No getting around it...

I'll try to get you started:

IP Addresses

Your home is connected to the internet through your ISP and most likely has one router/modem that is the interface between the internet (world wide) and intranet (your home). To make progress you will need to be able to log into your router/modem and have access to its configuration pages.

Technically every device in your home could have its own world wide available IP address but for a number of reasons that just isn't practical. You router/modem is the ONLY device that ends up getting assigned a publicly visible IP address. Google "what is my ip address" to see what your single address currently is.

All of your internal devices get private addresses that are reused by everyone. They are usually of the form 192.168.x.y or maybe 10.10.x.y but you need to understand that my 192.168.1.12 is not the same as your 192.168.1.12 and our internal addressing is only valid on our own networks.

Ports
The way computers talk to each other is by first identifying their IP address of the computer that is accepting connections, then secondarily identifying the sub-address (ports) withing that computer that will be accepting connection, then thirdly agreeing on what protocol they expect to chat with. For ease of use, there have been some standards that have been agreed to that the port should be usually equal to the protocol. Port 80 = web. Port 443 = secure web. Port 25 = email. etc etc etc. Of interest is that some folks think that they can 'fool' scammers by running their services on non-standard ports (ie running web on port 81 instead of 80) but that is a foolish idea because scammers can scan all ports in milliseconds to running web on non-standard will stop no one. FYI if you want to connect to web on a non-standard port you use the format http://domain.com:yy where yy is the non-standard port.

How web connections usually work...
Connect to web server at CNN by going to the web URL http://www.cnn.com your computer looks up the IP address of "www.cnn.com" and since we prefaced the URL with http:// then we assume we are going to use port 80. The data center at CNN is accepting incoming connections on their main firewalls on port 80 and serving up a nice pretty web page in the agreed upon protocol.

Connecting from the Internet to your Home devices...
Now let's think about your home rather than CNN... First, what domain name or IP address shall we use???? And what is your IP address???

This is always the first battle and is usually answered by using a Dynamic DNS service and a domain name assigned by that service. I think BI has some service for this but frankly I never used it and am not sure.

However you get the valid IP address of your home router, we then move to the second challenge... All incoming connections form the internet will hit your router/modem which by default... doesn't know what the heck to do with the incoming request. Your router gets a web request and barfs without setup steps.

[next step is port forwarding which is REQUIRED whether you use VPN or web forwarding or whatever. Even those who condemn port forward still area actually using port forwarding but they are forwarding to their VPN server rather than BI] I'll post a follow-up on port forwarding and VPN next.
HeneryH
Posts: 678
Joined: Thu Jul 18, 2019 2:50 pm

Re: Setup Android BI

Post by HeneryH »

Security
In general, exposing devices to the internet exposes them to the jungle of world wide scammers. Some devices are notoriously less secure and have long histories of being hacked by vulnerabilities. IP cameras are one of those notoriously insecure devices.

Your router/modem is your safety device between you and all of the skanks on the internet!!! (I changed my crude reference to something more tame :) )

NEVER setup your router to allow connection requests from the internet to be forwarded to your cameras or any other device that you don't have complete confidence in.

Some devices ARE more secure and can be set up to securely allow internet connection requests.

VPN - Virtual Private Networks are very secure and once a VPN connection is made, make it seem like you are actually home when you are away. You virtually tunnel through the VPN server and you are like home awaqy from home. The only problem is that they are more advanced to set up and use on a day to day basis.

Controlled and Limited Web Port Forwarding - If you trust your BI machine to be secure, you can expose just incoming web connection request to the internet. You do this by going into your router and configuring a rule to say that any incoming connection request to your home on port 80 (or 81) shall be forwarded to your BI computer on the same port 80 (or 81).

There are lots of alternatives in this area but you will NEED to grasp these basics first.
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