Situation
Camera drivers are added to the project and everything is working.
After a period of time (5min, a week or after a power outage) you (or the customer) see that the cameras stop working and the Camera Tests report an Authentication issue along with a 401 or 403 code.
Cause
As a security measure, Hikvision devices will block an IP address (Illegal Login Block) if too many incorrect sign in attempts occur in rapid succession.
There will be 1 or more instances of a driver in the project that has the wrong username, password or authentication type (Digest or Basic) that triggers the IP block on the Control4's controller, stopping all camera drivers from working.
Solution
1) Remove ALL unused Hikvision drivers. Do not leave any old or test drivers in the project
2) You need to confirm that the username and authentication type is correct across ALL drivers in the project.
This includes the NVR driver if you have that installed.
3) Since we cannot 'see' the passwords in Control4 camera drivers, you should manually update the password in each driver. I recommend typing the password into notepad and testing that it works with the webui login first, then copy and paste it into each driver, rather than typing it out.
4) Reboot the NVR - This will reset the Illegal Login Block
5) Test all the features used with the driver (camera tests, view the rtsp streams on the Navigators, Push Notifications, smart event triggers)
6) Confirm that everything works after the period in which you saw the authentication issues occur
7) Reboot the C4 controller to make sure that the issue doesn't re-appear after a power outage
Subsequent Issues
Issue only appears after a reboot/power outage
There have been a few cases where the controller is under significant load during the power on sequence and the initialization process for some drivers are dropped.
When this happens to a camera driver, the default default will be used password rather than the saved password. This triggers the Illegal Login Block in the NVR.
You will need to resolve the underlying C4 project issues causing this to occur.
If the issue continues to appear
Unfortunately, the best approach in these situations is to delete all the camera and NVR drivers in the project and re-add them one at a time, methodically testing each driver to make sure the issue isn't re-introduced.
Make sure you are using the Advanced drivers, have the NVR driver working and then making a binding between the camera and NVR drivers.